From the end of October, GitHub will offer business cloud customers the opportunity to keep their coding data within the EU. With this offer, GitHub wants to meet the growing demand for sovereignty.

GitHub is offering customers who have signed up for the Enterprise Cloud the option to store data within the EU. The offer will be valid from October 29th. GitHub can use the data center of its parent company Microsoft, which has twelve active Azure regions in Europe (the region in Belgium should be available soon).

Enterprise Server customers already had the freedom to choose where to store their data. This feature is now being extended to cloud customers. Until now, they were always forced to keep their data within the US. It is unclear whether GitHub customers will get access to all available Azure regions.

Crown Jewels

GitHub stresses that this offer was made at the request of customers and not under pressure from European regulations. The offer would eventually expand to other continents, where GitHub also says there is increasing demand for data sovereignty. Companies want to keep their “crown jewels” – the code – as close as possible, Chief Legal Officer Shelley McKinley told TechCrunch.

Many European companies today attach importance to being able to store their data locally. Large cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google are therefore investing heavily in expanding their data center infrastructure in order to provide a localized and/or sovereign cloud offering. Regulations such as the GDPR and the upcoming AI law certainly have an indirect influence here.