Data sovereignty, jurisdiction and UK-based backups

If you already know that you need a managed sovereign Backup and Disaster Recovery, click here to get in touch with Claranet about our solution.

The problem of jurisdictional exposure

Geopolitics has reintroduced an old board-level concern: jurisdictional exposure and data sovereignty. When reviewing your risk register, you have to prepare for the worst by asking the question: “Where is our backup recovery copy, and who can administer it?”  

For most businesses, it may be enough to rely on the Backup and Disaster Recovery that is provided as standard with your cloud solution. For organisations in regulated industries, who are concerned about data sovereignty in multiple jurisdictions, more probing and perturbing are now being added to their risk register during reviews.  

Questions like “what if, because of geopolitical factors beyond our control, we are unable to access our backup recovery copies, even briefly?” Take financial services as one example, where having access to backups to avoid significant downtime ( along with other measures to guarantee operational resilience) is a compliance requirement stipulated by the FCA. Suddenly, this question becomes all the more pertinent.  

One solution is to ensure that you have a managed sovereign Backup and Disaster Recovery solution (in addition to the protections given by your cloud provider), which is based in the UK.

Extra recovery options if you cannot access your standard backup

Let’s be clear – this doesn’t mean abandoning hyperscalers or public cloud environments, which would be obviously detrimental to many businesses. The objective is to ensure that at least one recovery path exists under clearly defined UK operating and legal conditions.  

That means if the backup provided by your hyperscaler (or cloud provider) is even briefly unavailable, you need to have a sovereign Backup and Disaster Recovery option which you can use to get back online as quickly as possible. The best way to ensure this is to have an extra backup recovery copy hosted in the UK.  

Claranet’s position is straightforward: we work with AWS and Microsoft Azure, and we also provide managed sovereign Backup and Disaster Recovery services designed to help customers recover their hosted environments following cyber incidents and disruption. For organisations that need UK-based assurance, Claranet operates UK-hosted recovery capability (for example, Claranet has delivered a dedicated Disaster Recovery environment hosted in its UK-based data centre for the Advertising Standards Authority).

If you’re in a regulated sector, like financial services, Claranet’s proposition focuses on compliance, resilience, and auditability, including helping you with compliant data back-up and clear audit trails.

Residency vs. sovereignty (and why it matters in Disaster Recovery)

When a UK-sovereign Disaster Recovery layer is typically justified

Below are a list of situations in which you may wish to consider a managed sovereign Backup and Disaster Recovery solution