Data Residency

Data residency ties a resource to a country and prevents Plakar Control Plane from moving its data anywhere else. Regulations often require that certain data never leaves a jurisdiction, and residency turns that requirement into something the system enforces on every operation rather than something operators have to remember each time they need to perform a task.

Setting a residency

Residency is set on an inventory by selecting the country its data belongs to. This can be modified from the inventory settings. Every resource discovered or added in that inventory inherits it, so an inventory that represents infrastructure in one country only has to be configured once.

It can also be set on an individual resource, from the Residency tab under the resource’s Settings tab. The General tab next to it holds the other resource settings. A residency set on a resource takes precedence over the one it inherits from its inventory, which covers infrastructure that does not sit in the same country as the rest of the inventory.

What residency constrains

A resource can only be used with other resources that have the same residency.

For example, if a source has a residency in France, only stores with a French residency can be selected for its backups. A restore can only use a destination with the same residency as the store, and a sync can only target a store with the same residency as its source.

PCP enforces this when you configure the task, so you cannot use resources with a different residency. This prevents a task from being configured to move data between different countries.

SLA policies follow the same rule. A policy only schedules a backup when the source and its store have the same residency, in addition to matching the policy’s other requirements.

Changing a residency

Policies do not have to be revisited when a residency changes. The policy scheduler re-evaluates what each policy matches and updates the schedules it owns, so a source that no longer shares a residency with the policy’s store stops being scheduled, and one that now does starts.