The importance of data residency hygiene is not a new reality, but cloud services tend to focus more on user productivity and less on user data privacy. The highly-productive nature of these services increases their adoption, resulting in a data that is at greater risk of exposure. With GDPR coming soon, it is important for to take steps to keep up. Here are some things to consider:
Identify important data. Enforcing a very broad policy on all types of content can be too restrictive and may hinder productivity. Enterprises will need to identify critical data that will need to be controlled within the geo-boundaries. This may be data relating to regulatory mandates such as health records, personally identifiable information and even company confidential data. All other content that does not fall under these constraints need not be controlled within the geo-boundaries.
Determine your geo-boundary and monitor movement of your data. To keep your important data where it belongs, you also need to determine the boundaries where the data should reside. In some cases, PII may be required to stay with a region (like the EU) and in other cases, it may be required to stay within the narrow bounds of a country such as Germany. A CASB can perform content inspection to identify important data as well as report on the movement of such data. To control data traveling beyond the geo-boundaries requires the CASB to map an IP address into graphical locations and proactively apply policies to keep the data where it should reside.