G Suite now lets businesses choose whether their data is stored in the US or Europe

Data sovereignty is a major issue for many major companies, especially in Europe. So far, Google’s G Suite, which includes products like Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets, didn’t give users any control over where their data was stored at rest, but that’s changing today. As the company announced at its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, G Suite users can now choose where to store primary data for select G Suite apps: in the U.S. or in Europe.

These new data regions are now available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers at no additional cost.

“What this means is that for organizations with data- or geo-control requirements, G Suite will now let them choose where to store the primary data for G Suite apps like Gmail should be stored at rest,” said G Suite VP of product management David Thacker.

Google is also adding a tool that makes it easy to move data to another region as employees move between jobs and organizations.

“Given PwC is a global network with operations in 158 countries, I am very happy to see Google investing in data regions for G Suite and thrilled by how easy and intuitive it will be to set up and manage multi-region policies for our domain,” said Rob Tollerton, director of IT at PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, in a canned statement about this new feature.