AI Executive Office — CXO Assistant Platform  ·  View 28 of 30  ·  7 · Assurance

Sovereignty and Residency

What stays in country, the short list of what is allowed out, and the constraint that could invalidate the design.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
In country — Meridia Central, customer-managed keys Data at rest OneLake CMK Decision store TDE + CMK Search index CMK Evidence immutable + CMK Logs in-region workspace Processing Model inference in-region deployment Embedding in-region ML training in-region compute Application compute in-region Key and identity control Key Vault mHSM customer holds the key Customer Lockbox approve support access PIM no standing admin Allowed out — explicitly, and only these Service telemetry no customer content Threat intelligence signatures in Package and image feeds build time only Never leaves the boundary Prompts and completions Retrieved passages Business data and KPIs Decision and audit records NISA control mapping evidence per control Model SKU availability is the open risk verify per region before signing revoke = unreadable declared Sovereignty — What Stays In Country, and What Is Allowed Out Data store Application we own Security / platform Interface / broker Risk / gap External / third party synchronous batch Residency is enforced by policy and private networking, not by intent. Azure Policy denies resource creation outside the permitted region, and the firewall denies egress that is not on the list. v 1.0 · owner Data & AI Global Practice · date 2026-09

How it is enforced

  • By policy and network, not by intent. Azure Policy at the management-group level denies resource creation outside the permitted region; the firewall denies egress that is not on the allow-list. A developer cannot accidentally deploy out of country
  • Customer-managed keys in a managed HSM, with the customer holding them. Revoking the key makes the data unreadable, which is a meaningful sovereignty guarantee rather than a contractual one
  • Customer Lockbox so vendor support access requires the customer's approval

What never leaves

  • Prompts and completions, retrieved passages, business data and KPIs, decision and audit records
  • What does leave, explicitly: service telemetry with no customer content, inbound threat intelligence, and build-time package feeds
  • Each item maps to a named national information-assurance control with evidence, produced as a control matrix during detailed design

The open risk

  • AI service and model SKU availability in a sovereign region is the constraint most likely to break this architecture, and it moves. Three fallbacks are pre-agreed: deploy the models the region has and accept a capability gap; place inference in a customer-approved alternative region under a data-boundary commitment; or defer the AI capability while the data platform ships. The choice is the customer's and belongs in the contract, not in a diagram
◀  Identity and Authorisation All views AI Governance and Guardrails  ▶
Solution Architecture v1.0 · Azure-native, multi-tenant, sovereign-capable · Data & AI Global Practice · 2026-0928-sovereignty-and-residency