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Data

Data sovereignty

The principle that data is subject to the laws of the country where it is collected or stored, and the practice of keeping it within chosen jurisdictions.

Data sovereignty becomes concrete when a fleet spans borders. Readings from a smart meter in one country may be personal data under that country’s rules, and sending them to a cloud region elsewhere can be restricted or require contractual safeguards. Public-sector and critical-infrastructure buyers often require that data stay in-country, and some sectors require that it stay on-premises.

The engineering response is to make location a design parameter. Cloud computing providers offer regional deployments, edge computing keeps raw data local and exports only aggregates, and data governance records which data class may travel where. Doing this late usually means re-architecting storage and identity.

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