Data residency at SpotMe

What is data residency?

Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization's data. It also refers to the legal or regulatory requirements imposed on that data, based on the country or region in which it resides.

In practice, organizations specify that their data must be stored in a location of their choice. That location’s legal or regulatory requirements in turn have a great influence on where businesses keep your personal information.

Why is this important?

Why? Because data residency laws vary by country or region; for example CCPA for the United States (US) and GDPR for the European Union (EU). 

If the region or country has specific data sovereignty laws, organizations have to comply with them. It’s therefore important to know where the services you use are storing your data.

In addition, organizations may have their own internal regulations on where data is stored.

Data residency options help you comply with these legal and/or internal requirements.

How does this work for SpotMe workspaces?

Data residency at SpotMe refers to the physical or geographic location of your workspace data.

Data residency is fully transparent to the user as it is chosen by the user when a workspace is created, and cannot be changed. 

SpotMe offers data residency in three different locations that are each different legislative entities:

• European Union (Germany)
• United States
• Singapore
  

The data residency (data location) that you select for the workspace will also determine which SpotMe infrastructure your workspace belongs to.

SpotMe infrastructure

There are two infrastructures currently used for workspaces on our platform, which both offer the three data locations mentioned above, chosen when creating the workspace.

• SpotMe Classic Cloud, which will be active up until the end of 2021.
• SpotMe NextGen Cloud, which is active since 2021.

How can I see what infrastructure my workspace is hosted on, and what data location?

You can identify which infrastructure your workspace is hosted on based on the URL of the web app or Backstage:

• If the URL contains “us1-20”, then the workspace is housed on SpotMe Classic Cloud.
• If the URL contains “us-”, then the workspace is housed on SpotMe NextGen Cloud, for example (e.g. us-webapp.spotme.com).
  

You can also see which data location your workspace is located on, based on the hostname prefix in the web app or Backstage URL:

What is considered workspace data, and what is not?

Workspace data stored in the data location

The following categories of customer data will be stored at rest in a data center within the customer’s selected region as of the date data residency is enabled:

• Workspace data (ie. sessions, forms, speakers, sponsors, etc.).
• Workspace user data.
• Files (ie. photos, documents, etc.) uploaded to SpotMe.
• User generated content (ie. chats, feed posts, session registrations, notes, etc.).

Note: On-demand recordings of live streams recorded through SpotMe RTMPS are distributed via CDN (Content Delivery Network), so we cannot guarantee the location of stream recordings.

Out of scope data

In order to provide the required functionalities, certain data sets such as Backstage organization names, Backstage users, video streaming and usage analytics are stored centrally in the EU (Germany) location, unless otherwise specified in the SpotMe sub-processors list (sl.spotme.com/subprocessors).