Choosing Your Region

Available regions

During account creation, you must choose one of three data residency regions. This determines the physical location of the Azure data centre where your governance data -- policies, procedures, assessment responses, control mappings, and uploaded documents -- is stored and processed.

Region	Azure Data Centre	Location
EU	Azure West Europe	Netherlands
ME	Azure UAE North	Dubai, UAE
US	Azure East US	Virginia, USA

What data residency means

When you select a region, all of the following are stored exclusively within that region:

• Your governance workspace data (all documents, templates, assessment answers, and control mappings)
• File attachments and uploaded evidence
• Database records including tenant metadata
• Encrypted backups

Certain non-governance data is processed outside your chosen region by third-party services:

• Payment processing -- Stripe processes billing data in the United States, regardless of your chosen region
• Transactional email -- Emails (verification, password reset, billing receipts) are sent via Resend, which operates in the United States
• Marketing site analytics -- Anonymised browsing data on seedgovernance.com is processed via global CDN infrastructure

Your governance content itself never leaves your selected region. For full transparency on sub-processors, see our Privacy Policy.

Why it matters

Choosing the right data residency region is important for several reasons:

Regulatory compliance

Many data protection laws require or strongly encourage that personal data be stored within specific jurisdictions. For example:

• GDPR (EU/EEA) -- While GDPR does not strictly require data to remain in the EU, storing data within an EEA data centre simplifies compliance and avoids the need for additional transfer mechanisms such as Standard Contractual Clauses.
• Saudi Arabia PDPL and NCA ECC -- Saudi regulations may require government and critical infrastructure entities to store data within the Kingdom or, at minimum, within the Middle East region.
• US federal and state regulations -- Some US industries (healthcare, financial services) benefit from data being stored on US soil to align with sector-specific requirements.

Data sovereignty

Your governance documents often contain sensitive information about your organisation's security posture, risk assessments, and compliance gaps. Keeping this data in a jurisdiction you trust reduces exposure to foreign government access requests and aligns with your organisation's risk appetite.

Latency and performance

While SeedGovernance is a document-focused platform (not a real-time application), choosing a region geographically close to your primary user base can result in slightly faster load times and a smoother editing experience.

How to choose

Use this simple decision guide:

• If most of your customers or data subjects are in the EU or EEA, choose EU (Netherlands)
• If you operate primarily in the GCC, Middle East, or North Africa, choose ME (Dubai)
• If you are a US-based company with primarily US operations, choose US (Virginia)
• If you operate globally and have no specific regional requirement, EU is typically the safest default, as the Netherlands data centre provides strong privacy protections under Dutch and EU law

Important: region cannot be changed

Once you select your data residency region during account creation, it cannot be changed. This is by design -- migrating encrypted governance data between regions would compromise the integrity guarantees we provide.

If you need to switch regions after account creation, you would need to:

1. Export all your documents from the existing workspace
2. Create a new account with the desired region
3. Re-import your documents into the new workspace
4. Delete the original account

Because of this, we strongly recommend discussing the region choice with your legal or compliance team before creating your account. If you are unsure, contact our team and we will help you decide.