GitHub has announced an option offering tighter control over where data is stored to meet regional requirements. The GitHub Enterprise Cloud data residency feature will launch on October 29 for the European Union, with additional regions including Australia, Asia and Latin America to be added later.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) is a deployment option for GitHub Enterprise. It includes SAML authentication, extra GitHub Actions minutes, the ability to restrict email notifications to verified domains, privately published GitHub pages sites, managed user accounts, repository rulesets, and GitHub's compliance reports.

The new feature means EU customers get more control over where their code and data is stored. The option has been added to meet the requirements of the European data protection regulations. GitHub says GHEC will allow customers to store code and repository data in their preferred region. It will also offer unique, company-specific namespaces on ghe.com, isolated from the open source cloud, as well as enhanced controls to allow organizations to manage user accounts.

While GitHub is fronting the feature, behind the scenes the data is being hosted by Azure, and makes use of Azure's data residency features rather than GitHub building new datacenters in the EU. This means companies choosing the new GitHub option need to consider Microsoft Azure's data residency rules, which says that data stored in one region may be replicated to other regions for resiliency. Microsoft does promise to keep replicated data in the same 'Geo'. Geo is Microsoft's term for geographic regions, and there is a Europe region. 

This sounds as though the feature meets the EU data protection requirements, but Microsoft has also said that AI and machine learning services may send data outside the selected geography.

The end result of all this is that if an organization is simply trying not to get fined by the EU for failing the data protection requirements, GitHub Enterprise Data Residency will meet all the requirements. On the other hand, if a company needs to be 100 percent sure where their data is stored,  the only completely secure route is to store data in a datacenter that is run or controlled by the company.

Data residency on GHEC will be available to Enterprise customers in the European Union at the end of October.

More Information

GitHub Enterprise

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