Managing Data Across Borders: Data Sovereignty with Distributed Databases

As businesses operate on a global scale, the challenge of managing data across borders has never been more pressing. With varying data protection laws worldwide, such as GDPR, companies must navigate a complex landscape to keep their data flows efficient.

This presentation explores how distributed databases can be strategically leveraged to address these challenges, focusing on the technical aspects of multi region data management.

We’ll start by setting the stage for the core issue: achieving global data management that respects local data sovereignty laws without sacrificing operational performance. We’ll outline the key features needed in a distributed database system to support this balance, emphasizing scalability, data localization, and high availability in a multi-regional context.

The talk will proceed with a comparative look at several leading distributed database technologies, such as CockroachDB, Google Cloud Spanner, and AWS Aurora.

A highlight of this session will be a live technical demonstration showcasing the setup of a multi-region database designed to support data sovereignty principles.

This talk aims to arm developers, architects, and IT leaders with the technical knowledge and tools to build more compliant, efficient, and scalable global data systems.