Regulatory Data-Residency Violation During Cross-Region Failover
eu-west-1 degraded, and the Global Traffic Manager's automatic failover policy did exactly what it was built to do: it silently shifted EU customer traffic to us-east-1 to protect availability. EU request availability and latency both look perfectly healthy. What the availability dashboard doesn't show is that EU personal data is now being processed and stored in a US region — a live GDPR data-residency violation that accrues for every minute it continues. Do you force an immediate fail-back and risk reopening the outage, stay failed over and let the violation keep accruing, or wait for EU's own infrastructure to genuinely recover before routing traffic back through a residency-enforcing gateway? There is no option here that costs nothing.
- Difficulty
- Principal
- Expected Time
- ~22 min
- Category
- Security & Identity
Skills
- Recognizing that an availability-only failover policy can create a silent compliance violation
- Distinguishing an availability dashboard reading healthy from an incident actually being resolved
- Deciding when to act under uncertainty about a dependent region's true recovery state
- Separating a compliance remediation (breach notification) from an availability remediation
System Architecture
- Global Traffic Manager
- EU Region (eu-west-1)
- US Failover Region (us-east-1)
- Data Residency Compliance Gateway
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