Data Residency: Data Stays Local to Where Your Users Are

Data Residency

It is extremely useful to be able to specifically target your users based on various attributes when rolling out new features and experiments. This sort of targeting often requires the usage of user data for the best experience. However, this becomes a major privacy concern: as data residency becomes more and more important, companies are looking for ways to keep their user's data within the borders of the countries they reside in. This is often a difficult task, as companies need to ensure that their users can access their data from anywhere in the world, without that data being necessarily transferred across the world.

DevCycle's EdgeDB offers a unique solution to this problem. Data saved to EdgeDB remains within the regions defined by your team, meaning that it is compliant with any necessary standards. Communication between servers only happens between those closest to the data, ensuring security and speed. This makes EdgeDB an ideal solution for companies looking for GDPR compliance or Schrems II compliance.

What is EdgeDB?

EdgeDB is a globally replicated user data store available at edge for use with DevCycle. The data stored here can be used for things such as Edge Flags and Super Segments, ensuring that you can import users and data from anywhere and keep it accessible for targeting from anywhere. Read more about it here.

How EdgeDB ensures privacy

EdgeDB will, by default, replicate all data worldwide across its edge network, making the data always available at edge. Typically, a developer would have to send this data into an initialization of an SDK to receive their feature flags. This can be a privacy risk, as storing user data directly within your apps on your user’s devices isn’t guaranteed to be secure. Instead, by managing your user data in EdgeDB, there is no need to have any data on a client device, and this means no user data will ever be transferred to the device.

How EdgeDB enables Data Residency and GDPR/Schrems II compliance

To double down on privacy, DevCycle offers a data residency selection to Enterprise clients. This allows you to select the exact regions you would like your user’s data to remain in. Data will not ever be replicated outside of that region. Even if your user leaves that region, the data will not follow them at all, ensuring that you can remain fully compliant while still getting the power of advanced user targeting.

Why Data Residency is important

Data residency is important for companies for a variety of reasons. The first and most obvious reason is compliance. Many countries have regulations about where data can be stored and how it can be accessed. Storing data in a location that is compliant with these regulations is critical for companies doing business in those countries.

Another reason data residency is important is security. By keeping data within the borders of the country it resides in, companies can minimize the risk of data breaches. This is especially important in light of the recent GDPR regulations.

Finally, data residency can help improve performance. By keeping data as close to the users as possible, companies can reduce the latency associated with accessing that data.

Curious to learn more about what this level of security compliance could mean for your team? Start using DevCycle today.