Where your data sleeps

A European region is not the same thing as a European provider, and the distinction is the entire point of this note.

If your data sits in a Frankfurt data centre operated by a subsidiary of a company incorporated in another jurisdiction, the physical location tells you where the disks spin. It does not tell you who can be compelled to produce their contents, or under whose law.

Residency is geography. Sovereignty is jurisdiction. Marketing pages tend to sell the first and imply the second.

The three questions

When we audit an estate for a client who cares about this, we ask three questions and write the answers down:

1. Where is the data at rest? A country, not a “region” name.
2. Who is the legal entity operating the service, and where is it incorporated? Not the brand — the entity on the contract.
3. Who holds the encryption keys, and can they be compelled to use them? If the provider can decrypt your data without your involvement, they can be made to.

The third question is the one that separates a claim from an architecture. A provider who cannot read your data cannot be compelled to produce it in a readable form, and that is a structural property rather than a promise.

What we usually end up building

Dedicated or virtual machines in Sweden, Romania or Germany — the three countries we operate in — described as NixOS configurations in the client’s own repository. PostgreSQL, MinIO and Redis run by the client rather than rented as managed services, because a managed service is a jurisdiction you cannot see. WireGuard between regions. Backups to a second provider, in a second country, encrypted with keys the client holds.

None of this is exotic. It is roughly the architecture everybody had in 2012, with fifteen years of better tooling wrapped around it.

The part nobody puts in the brochure

It is also, in our experience, between forty and seventy per cent cheaper per month — but that is not the reason clients call. They call because a customer sent them a procurement questionnaire, or a regulator asked a question their current answer does not survive.

The cost saving is a side effect of the same decision: if you are not renting managed services, you are not paying for them.

The honest cost

You take on operational work you were previously buying. Somebody has to patch, monitor, and be on call. For a company with any engineering capacity at all, the declarative approach makes that a smaller job than it was a decade ago — a machine is a file, and a new one is a copy of that file.

But it is not zero, and anyone who tells you it is has not run the machines.