Data Residency in Azure VMs between West and North Europe

Question

After reading the Data residency in Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/data-residency/#overview) and the
Enabling Data Residency and Data Protection in Microsoft Azure Regions
(https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/achieving-compliant-data-residency-and-security-with-azure/Enabling_Data_Residency_and_Data_Protection_in_Azure_Regions-2021.pdf)
it is still unclear to me what is happening in the case of North and West Europe.

Based in the first source those regions are paired and data are being transferred between those two regions, to maintain resiliency, although they are different countries.
Also the second source (page 15) suggests that:

Microsoft may replicate customer data to other regions within the same geo for data resiliency.
For example, if a customer deploys Azure Blob Storage in Japan East, the customer data may be
replicated to Japan West for disaster recovery purposes, but will remain stored inside Japan.

But what happens in the case of North and West Europe?
Can an Azure VM be configured in such a way that it is sure that data (disks) will only be copied inside West Europe?
Does it make any difference if locally-redundant storage or zone-redundant storage is being used?
If Azure can guarantee that data stays in West Europe region, does this also apply for an Azure VM that is getting started from a image obtained by the Marketplace?

Answer 1

North Europe (Ireland) and West Europe (Netherlands) are both located in the European Union so both Azure regions are bound by the same EU data protection laws.

If you are using locally-redundant or zone-redundant storage then your data will stay within the primary Azure region that you have chosen to deploy into, e.g. West Europe. If you have chosen geo-redundant storage then your data will be replicated between North Europe and West Europe. The idea with geo-redundant storage is that your data will be accessible in another Azure region in the event of a disaster like a major Azure regional outage.

If you are using managed disks then there is no option for GRS storage anyway so you would have to enable disaster recovery (using Azure site recovery) to replicate your data to another Azure region.

Answer 2

Hello @Evangelos Dimitriadis ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to answer your question.

But what happens in the case of North and West Europe?
Entire Europe is considered as one geographical cluster, hence the North Europe is the paired datacenter for West Europe.

Can an Azure VM be configured in such a way that it is sure that data (disks) will only be copied inside West Europe?

No, we don't have such an option. If you need to have another local copy of the VM within same region which you can use any time you want to do a disaster recovery, Azure Site Recovery(ASR) Zone to Zone replication is the option. Here is a link for ASR DR replication between different zones in same region.
In general for the data residency, azure controls planned maintenance and recovery prioritization for regional pairs. Some Azure services rely upon regional pairs by default, such as Azure redundant storage.

Does it make any difference if locally-redundant storage or zone-redundant storage is being used?
Yes, as you might know, Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of your data so that it is protected from planned and unplanned events, including transient hardware failures, network or power outages, and massive natural disasters. Redundancy ensures that your storage account meets its availability and durability targets even in the face of failures.
Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times within a single data center in the primary region.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your Azure Storage data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region

For details, refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy

If Azure can guarantee that data stays in West Europe region, does this also apply for an Azure VM that is getting started from a image obtained by the Marketplace?
This is based on what data redundancy approach is chosen. Zone redundant data is always stored in same region but across three Azure availability zones in the primary region. Each availability zone is a separate physical location with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Please "Accept as Answer" and Upvote if any of the above helped to help others in the community looking for remediation for similar issues.

Answer 3

Guten Tag - was ist wenn wir zuvor EU hatten und jetzt auf Local (Schweiz) umgestellt wird. Gibte es da auch ein paaring mit Europa?