Cloud Pub/Sub - Data movement and Message store - Is it region specific?

[R P]

In the context of GDPR (Data residency), the data movement and storage is restricted to the region from where the data gets originated. This data cannot be moved from this region for any purpose, be it for fail-over replication or backup. Is Cloud Pub/Sub compliant with this requirement. The document does not guarantee concretely anywhere. 

This answer to this question is the DEAL maker/breaker for Cloud Pub/Sub.

thanks, Raghavendra Prakash.

[George (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Raghavendra, 

You are right, there is no guarantee that data gets stored solely in one region or only a group of regions exclusively; Cloud Pub/Sub is a global service: the clients are unaware of the physical location (or data center location) of any servers or data and can publish and subscribe from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. 

On the other hand, once at least one subscriber for each subscription has acknowledged the message, Cloud Pub/Sub deletes the message from storage. You may check the "Cloud Pub/Sub: A Google-Scale Messaging Service" page. 

[R P]

Thanks for the reply. As per GDPR data residency needs, the message shall not even to another region. How can I convince my customer that using Clod Pub/Sub is GDPR compliant. Please advise.

[Kir Titievsky]

You have several ways to help you ensure compliance, as many of our users have:

First, recognize that Pub/Sub makes every effort to store data closest to the source of the publication. Once stored, the data is not moved to another storage location without explicit action by the user.  Practically this means that it’s is highly unlikely for your data to be stored far from the publisher client.  

Second, Pub/Sub provides monitoring on data storage location (size of backlog by region, for example).  You can, therefore, monitor for potential violations and take action by discarding the backlog using Pub/Sub's seek's functionality or ensuring that it is quickly processed.

Third, you can limit your risk by reducing message retention duration.

Finally, we are working on a more direct, explicit set of controls. We expect to share detail on this in the coming months. 

Kir

Product Manager 

Cloud Pub/Sub

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 11:12 AM Raghavendra Prakash <raghavend...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the reply. As per GDPR data residency needs, the message shall not even to another region. How can I convince my customer that using Clod Pub/Sub is GDPR compliant. Please advise.

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Kir Titievsky | Product Manager | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 

[R P]

Thanks Kir for the useful explanation. I shall look forward for direct set of controls.

[Kir Titievsky]

Update: Pub/Sub now supports controlling where your message data is stored.  See https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/resource-location-restriction .