Data residency and sovereignty compliance

One general rule

Though there is a wide variation between requirements, meeting this single rule ensures that your organization remains in compliance:

• Preventing access to customer and employee data outside of their home legal jurisdiction;
• Exception: When explicit consent is given on a per usage basis

Encrypt data at rest and restrict data access

The solution is to encrypt all data-at-rest and only allow access to data-at-rest from the jurisdiction where it originates.

With Thales, solving the problem for data at rest is simple. Use Thales’ CipherTrust transparent encryption with access control to limit data access to only those within a specific jurisdiction. This will satisfy all but a few national requirements (Germany and Spain are specific exceptions).

For enterprises

At the file, system and volume level, encrypt data sets from each jurisdiction with CipherTrust transparent encryption. Set access controls (linked to your directory services infrastructure) so that the data-at-rest can only be decrypted by those within each country. Others will have no access to information, seeing only encrypted data blocks. For best practice, have each country keep their own encryption keys locally, so that even security management personnel from outside their jurisdiction cannot change encryption keys or access policies.

For access to information stored within databases and applications, link access to directory services infrastructure or other access management tools. You can also encrypt data on a column, field or database file level with CipherTrust application data protection and manage encryption keys using the CipherTrust Manager appliance interfaces to match jurisdictions. Enterprises can also use Thales’ centralised, uniformly managed CipherTrust Manager to coordinate these operations.

For cloud providers

Offer customers the option to encrypt data-at-rest, managing their own encryption keys from within their local jurisdiction and locking out access by others. With CipherTrust transparent encryption from Thales, data-at-rest encryption is done by giving each customer its own local, physical or virtual CipherTrust manager, combined with agents on each customer system linked to that management instance. Consider becoming a Thales Partner.