Data Residency and Sovereignty in Azure

Business Problem  

During my last assignment with a client for migrating some on-premise applications and data to Microsoft Azure, I was asked by the customer that they would only be allowed to store the data in a particular geo location. That is to say, they wanted to know how cloud will help them to follow data residency and sovereignty requirements.

What Is Data Residency?

Data residency is a compliance requirement where a business focuses on storing their data in a specific geo-location. There may be many reasons for this requirement, but it is generally governed by government compliance, such as GDPR in Europe.