Hightouch is going multi-region: why you should care about data residency

With the ever-increasing number of data residency, security, and compliance laws, companies are getting stricter about how their data is stored. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of Hightouch’s first European region, hosted in AWS EU-West-1 (Ireland).

Hightouch customers can now run their Reverse ETL workloads in our new European region and keep their data close to home. Data privacy is something we care deeply about, so we’re proud to have launched a capability that gives our European customers confidence that their data remains compliant with GDPR’s data residency regulations, both in-transit and at-rest.

Starting today, with Hightouch you can select EU-West-1 Ireland when creating a new workspace. At every stage of your Sync, your data will remain within EU borders, while also being protected by industry-standard encryption and security best practices. If you're a Business tier customer, you can even request to have your existing workspace transferred over to EU-West-1 if you wish.

What Is Data Residency, and Why Should I Care?

Data residency refers to the geographic location in which data is stored. Numerous jurisdictions around the world impose regulations on where data, especially personal data, can be transferred or stored. Two well-known examples of data residency regulations are the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act.

There are several advantages to a multi-region approach in the context of Reverse ETL. Firstly, you can minimize the latency of your data by storing it closer to your end-users. Access to multi-region also greatly lowers your chance of an outage when a region goes down or a cloud failure occurs. All of this will contribute to improving the speed of your data syncs. Finally, selecting a Reverse ETL provider that keeps your data within EU borders prepares your organization for future regulatory uncertainty.

Why We Decided to Do Multi-Region

Since Hightouch was founded, we’ve focused on building the best possible product for our customers. Data privacy is something we care deeply about, so we’re proud to have launched a capability that gives our European customers confidence that their data remains fully compliant with GDPR’s data residency regulations. We have been hard at work updating our architecture to support multi-region to give you granular control over how, when, and where your data is stored.

What’s Next?

Even though our multi-region capabilities are currently limited to Europe, soon we will be rolling out more regions (Asia Pacific) to make Hightouch even more accessible. Currently, Hightouch only runs on AWS, but soon we will be implementing multi-cloud so you can run your workloads wherever you want. We’re planning on expanding Hightouch to the Google Cloud Platform so GCP customers can run syncs closer to their data.

While most companies are still in Beta, we’re ahead of the curve when it comes to introducing multi-region. We hope you’ll take this as our continued commitment to place your needs at the forefront of every engineering decision we make. We’ll continue to make Hightouch even easier to integrate with any modern data stack. If you want to learn more about our recent addition of multi-region, read our documentation or sign up for free.