Keep regulated data inside the UAE
Design and move workloads into UAE cloud regions such as AWS me-central-1, Azure UAE North or Core42 when health, financial or customer data must stay in the country.
Overview
Several UAE rules push data into the country. Federal Law No. 2 of 2019 on ICT in health fields, Article 13, generally requires health data to be stored and processed in the UAE. DIFC and ADGM have their own data protection regimes, and the Central Bank expects licensed firms to control where outsourced data and services sit.
We build and migrate the technical side: in-country accounts on AWS me-central-1, Azure UAE North or Core42, with the network, encryption, logging and backup design that keeps regulated data where it should be. We are technical, not legal advisers. Your legal or compliance team decides what the rules require, and we make the platform match that decision.
Signs you need this
- Production data sits in eu-west-1 or a US region and a UAE customer has asked why
- Backups, logs or analytics copies leave the country even though the main database does not
- Your team is unsure which managed services exist in the UAE regions
- A tender or contract requires in-country hosting and you have a fixed deadline
What you get
- Data flow map
- Where each category of data is created, stored, backed up, logged and sent, including third-party SaaS and support tooling.
- Region service check
- Which services you use are available in me-central-1, UAE North or Core42, and the workaround for each one that is not.
- In-country landing zone
- Accounts or subscriptions with region restrictions, key management in the UAE region and central logging that stays in the country.
- Migration of regulated workloads
- Databases, object storage and application services moved with replication, verification and a rollback plan.
- Guardrails against drift
- Policies that block resources and backups from being created outside approved regions, with alerts when someone tries.
- Evidence for your compliance team
- Architecture diagrams, region policies and configuration exports they can attach to audits or regulator responses.
How the work runs
- 1
Data mapping
1 to 3 weeks
Trace data through the application, backups, logs, monitoring and vendors. Agree with your compliance team which data must stay in the UAE.
- 2
Region design
1 to 2 weeks
Choose the provider and region, check service availability and design the in-country network, identity and key management.
- 3
Build and migrate
3 to 8 weeks
Build the environment in code, replicate data, cut over each workload and confirm no copies remain outside the approved regions.
- 4
Lock down and document
1 to 2 weeks
Turn on region restriction policies, test that they block what they should, and hand over the evidence pack.
Timings depend on the size of your estate. The assessment fixes them before any build starts.
What you can check afterwards
- Regulated data, its backups and its logs are stored in UAE regions
- Encryption keys for that data are held in-country
- Policies reject new resources outside the approved regions
- Your compliance team has diagrams and configuration exports to show reviewers
Tools we work with
- AWS me-central-1
- Azure UAE North
- Core42
- AWS KMS
- Azure Key Vault
- AWS service control policies
- Azure Policy
- Terraform
- AWS DMS
- PostgreSQL
Questions buyers ask
- Can you tell us what the law requires?
- No. We are engineers, not lawyers. We can explain what the technical options are and build to the requirement your legal or compliance adviser sets.
- Are all AWS or Azure services available in the UAE regions?
- Not all. Availability changes over time, so we check the services you actually use at the start and plan a replacement for any that are missing.
- Can we keep non-regulated workloads where they are?
- Often yes. Many setups keep marketing sites, internal tools or anonymised analytics outside the UAE and move only the regulated data paths.
- What happens after the migration?
- Your team runs the environment. We leave runbooks and policies in code, and we can provide business-hours support if you want it.
Talk to us about UAE data residency and in-country cloud.
Tell us what you run and where. We reply within one business day with questions or a quote.