Equinix expands Fabric Geo Zones in data sovereignty drive

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Equinix has announced a major expansion of its Fabric Geo Zones service as the data center provider aims to shore up customer data sovereignty capabilities.

Fabric Geo Zones is designed to ensure that enterprise data remains within defined jurisdictions. According to the firm, unlike solutions built within a single cloud or delivered as software overlays, Fabric Geo Zones enforces sovereignty at the network layer.

"Sovereignty can't be a setting you configure inside a single cloud. Global enterprises must enforce sovereignty at the network layer, across every cloud, provider and path simultaneously," said Arun Dev, vice president of digital interconnection at Equinix.

"Equinix Fabric Geo Zones is the only solution that enforces geographic boundaries as a property of the network itself. Traffic either flows along compliant paths or it's blocked. That's why enterprises across industries trust Equinix to move data across clouds without compromising sovereignty."

Data sovereignty in the spotlight

Inadvertently moving sovereign data across borders that organizations are legally required to respect is a growing risk when working in hybrid multi-cloud environments, said Courtney Munroe, founder of Apex Research.

"Businesses are facing one of the most complex global regulatory environments in history while at the same time facing huge pressure to deploy new technologies," he said.

"A global enterprise operating under GDPR in Europe, LGPD in Brazil, and APRA in Australia simultaneously needs different data routing rules for each jurisdiction, with every outage, failover, or congestion event a potential compliance violation."

Recent research from Kiteworks found that one-in-three organizations has experienced a sovereignty-related incident in the past 12 months. One-in-eight of these incidents consisted of unauthorized cross-border transfers.

In Europe, 44% cited provider sovereignty guarantees as their top barrier to cloud adoption – the highest of any region – despite near-universal GDPR compliance.

“Organizations across every region we surveyed are spending millions on sovereignty compliance, scoring high on awareness, and still getting hit by breaches, unauthorised transfers, and government access requests,” said Dario Perfettibile, EMEA GM of GTM and customer operations at Kiteworks.

Fabric Geo Zones is available in preview in countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, with European Union availability expected in June.

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Emma Woollacott is a freelance journalist writing for publications including the BBC, Private Eye, Forbes, Raconteur and specialist technology titles.

Data sovereignty in the spotlight

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