Special Consideration for Canadian Clients

At CloudRun we've compiled a menu of options for our Canadian clients that let you use some of the most popular SaaS offerings, while adhering to Canadian data residency requirements.

Did you know?

Office 365 is a popular choice for organizations of all sizes. While you can select Canada as the region of deployment, user identity data (Azure AD) will not be stored in Canada. This is just one example of a challenge of adhering to Canadian data residency requirements.

 

Do I need to store data on Canadian soil? Does PIPEDA require it?

The short answer is NO. There is no law that requires private sector companies to store data on the Canadian soil. Some organizations however have internal requirements that necessitate the practice. In organizations that do have data residency requirements, there is often room to negotiate for some data to be stored in other regions.

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2018 CLOUD Act

With passage of the CLOUD Act, U.S. based cloud providers are required to provide access to data under a subpoena or warrant, regardless of where in the world the data is stored. This may be a consideration for you depending on the nature of your business and the type of data that you store.

 

For HA and DR consideration, is Azure a better choice over AWS as it has 2 regions in Canada?

Not necessarily. Azure region is not equivalent to an AWS region. AWS regions are comprised of multiple availability zones. Each AZ is comprised of at least one data center. The AZs are located at most 100km apart and are on separate power grids and flood plains. In Canada, AWS has 1 region with 3 availability zones. That's at least 3 data centers.

For Azure, what comprises a region is not well defined and might vary from region to region. There are 2 regions in Canada. Each of those regions may be equivalent to a single AZ in AWS terminology. The regions (or data centers) are indeed spaced much further apart, although both are on the eastern seaboard.

In short, there is no clear "better choice" between providers and the Canadian offerings are comparable.

You have options

While many SaaS solutions may look attractive, you need to be aware of where the data will be stored. For example: Okta, Auth0, Microsoft B2C, and Salesforce all do not offer Canadian data residency option. There are however alternative ways to use the solutions and keep the data in Canada.

At CloudRun we've compiled a menu of options for our Canadian clients that let you use some of the most popular SaaS offerings, while adhering to Canadian data residency requirements.

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