Data residency vs Data sovereignty

One distinction. Hundreds of thousands of euros on the line.

Data residency is simple — it's the physical location of your data. "Our servers are in Frankfurt." AWS, Azure, and any provider with EU data centres can offer this.

Data sovereignty is something else entirely — it's about which country's laws apply to your data. Who can access it, which courts have jurisdiction, and what regulations govern it.

In practice: you can store data in the EU and still be subject to US law if your provider is a US-based company.

Many organisations build their entire compliance strategy around what they think is required — and end up either overpaying for infrastructure they don't need, or exposed to risks they didn't know existed.

The right starting point isn't a migration project.
It's an honest map of the regulations that actually apply to you.

Know your position first. Everything else follows.

#DataSovereignty #DataResidency #CloudCompliance #GDPR #GartSolutions #DigitalTransformation #CloudMigration