Choose a geographic location for your data

Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Starter, Frontline Standard, and Frontline Plus; Business Standard and Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus; Enterprise Essentials Plus. Compare your edition

As an administrator, you can use data regions to store your covered Google Workspace data in a specific geographic location. Your location options are the United States, European Union (labeled Europe in the Google Admin console), or No preference.

Users who don't have a supported edition aren't covered by data region policies—even if you apply a data region policy to their organizational unit.

On this page

Before you begin

Consider tradeoffs

Before you choose a region for your data, consider the following points:

  • Selecting a specific region doesn't improve performance or fine-tune your network or data access.
  • Sometimes, users outside the region where their data is located might experience higher latency. Latency can happen when users:
    • Edit shared items in real time across regions.
    • Share files with someone outside of their region.
    • Travel internationally.
  • If you select a data region other than No preference, the User-reported phishing alert might not trigger in the Alert Center. As a workaround, you can use the security investigation tool to search the Gmail messages log with the filter Event is: User spam classification AND Spam classification is: Phishing. Or, you can set up a custom activity rule.
  • In rare cases, when a data region is selected, users outside that region might lose access to the data due to events beyond Google's control (for example, natural disasters).
  • (Enterprise Plus and Frontline Plus only) If an administrator decides to include processing in their data regions policy, some advanced features might become unavailable. Learn more about advanced settings for data regions.

Data region conflicts

When users send direct messages from different data regions, their data is stored in both regions. For example:

User A's region

User B's region

Direct messages data region

USA

EU

USA/EU

Any region

EU

Any region/EU

Set a data region policy

Step 1: Set up the organizational structure

Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus; Enterprise Plus; Enterprise Essentials Plus. Compare your edition

Note: If you use only one data region for all of your users, you can skip this step.

You can choose one data region for some of your users, or different data regions for specific departments or teams:

  • To set the data region policy by department—Put user accounts in an organizational unit.
  • To set the data region policy for users across or within departments—Put users in a configuration group.

Step 2: Choose where your data is located

Learn about our data center locations.

Before you begin: If needed, learn how to apply the setting to a department or group.

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Data and then Compliance and then Data regions.

    Requires having the Data Regions Settings administrator privilege.

  2. Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus; Enterprise Plus; Enterprise Essentials Plus.

    (Optional) To apply the setting only to some users, at the side, select an organizational unit (often used for departments) or configuration group (advanced).

    Group settings override organizational units. Learn more

  3. Click Region, and then:
    1. Click Data at rest and then select a region: No Preference, United States, or Europe (for the EU) and then click Save.

    2. Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Plus; Enterprise Plus, Enterprise Essentials Plus.

      Click Data processing and then check the Process data at your selected data at rest region box and then click Save.
  4. Click Save. Or, you might click Override for an organizational unit.

    To later restore the inherited value, click Inherit (or Unset for a group).

Step 3: View the status of your data regions settings

With Google Workspace Frontline Plus or Enterprise Plus, you can view the status of your data regions storage within 24–48 hours of making a change to your data region policy. If you have Google Workspace Assured Controls, you can view the status of your storage and processing in an advanced report.

To view data regions status:

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Reporting and then Apps reports and then Data regions.

    Requires having the Data Regions Reporting administrator privilege.

In the basic report, you can view the status of your region's data at rest. The advanced report includes data at rest plus data processing broken down by region and by application.

For more information on the status of your data, go to View your data regions status reports.

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