Data sovereignty is the question of where your data lives and which law applies to it. It is not a purely technical subject: it is first of all risk management. The right approach is not to worry, but to know what your situation requires and to choose hosting that keeps you compliant without thinking about it every day.
What “sovereignty” means in practice
Your data is stored somewhere, on servers in a given country, subject to a given law. Sovereignty is keeping control of that location and of who can access it. For many organisations, European hosting answers this need very well. For some, keeping data in a specific country is a requirement in its own right — France for many of our clients, but equally another jurisdiction your activity calls for. That is a case we set up to match, rather than an implied promise.
Compliance, without the fear
Talking about legal obligations does not mean waving a threat. It means giving you the right information to decide. Depending on your sector and your jurisdiction, you have responsibilities over your data: knowing where it is, who accesses it, how long to keep it, how to respond in the event of a leak.
These requirements exist, they are manageable, and ignoring them is a needless risk. Our role is to name them and to cover them with you, not to sell you a worry.
Several jurisdictions, one method
Our clients work in several countries, and the rules are not the same everywhere. The method, however, does not change: identify the obligations that actually apply to you, then line up the hosting, the access and the retention periods to match. This mapping work avoids both costly over-caution and the blind spot that one day comes at a cost.
The French private cloud, when it makes sense
When hosting in France is required, we offer a private cloud on national territory, managed for you — and the same applies if you need it elsewhere in the EU, or in another jurisdiction such as Switzerland or Jersey: you decide where your data lives, we host it and keep it running. It is an option, not a default sales argument: most of the time, a well-run Microsoft 365 is enough. But on the day your activity calls for it, the option exists and it is clean.
This hosted infrastructure is part of our Off-site offer, and keeping control of your backups is part of our approach to backup. If you are unsure where you stand on your obligations, that is a good starting point for a conversation.
