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Data Residency for Azure SQL in East Asia region

Noodles2302 1 Reputation point
2023-09-18T10:27:02.3733333+00:00

Looking to understand any conditions or constraints around the standing up of certain Azure services in East Asia region, largely from a data residency perspective.

 

The commentary in the following article is unclear as to what it means, particularly for a service like Azure SQL.

Data Residency in Azure | Microsoft Azure

 

Azure SQL is noted as being available on East Asia but the commentary of “The previewed feature to enable storing customer data in a single region is currently only available in the Southeast Asia Region (Singapore) of the Asia Pacific Geo and Brazil South (Sao Paulo State) Region of Brazil Geo. For all other regions, customer data is stored in Geo.” is confusing.

Is the feature in preview,  the ability to enable storage only with single region currently limited to Southeast Asia (for the Asia Pacific geo), meaning that for Hong Kong this feature is not yet available and therefore there is currently no ability to limit the storage of data for Azure SQL to the East Asia region?  And that this limitation does not apply to Hyperscale?

 

So ultimately the question is, for an Azure SQL service stood up in East Asia region, is the data stored in East Asia?

Azure SQL Database

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  1. Amira Bedhiafi 20,176 Reputation points
    2023-09-18T10:57:35.15+00:00

    Q1 : That means that the feature that allows customer data to be stored in a single region (iexample : not replicated to any other regions) is only available in:

        - Southeast Asia Region (specifically, Singapore) for the Asia Pacific geo 

    - Brazil South Region (specifically, Sao Paulo State) for the Brazil geo

    - For all other regions, data is stored in a larger geographic cluster ("Geo"). A Geo typically contains multiple Azure regions, which means that data can potentially be replicated across those regions for resilience and disaster recovery.

    Q2 : Yes, this feature is currently in preview and is limited to Southeast Asia (Singapore) for the Asia Pacific region. This means that, for Azure SQL databases in Hong Kong (East Asia region), the feature to restrict data storage to only that specific region is not yet available. Thus, data could potentially be stored or replicated in other regions within the same Geo.

    Q3: there is no current ability to limit the storage of Azure SQL data to only the East Asia region. You didn't explicitly mention Hyperscale. If there are specific requirements or differences for Hyperscale regarding data residency, it would be best to consult the Azure documentation or Azure support directly.

    Q4 : Yes, the primary data for an Azure SQL service created in the East Asia region will be stored in East Asia. However, due to resilience and disaster recovery reasons, backups or replicas of that data might be stored in other regions within the same Geo unless the feature to limit data to a single region is available and has been enabled.

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