Does it matter where your data is stored?

Data storage with Storyblok

Storyblok is a headless CMS that stores and delivers the content of your application.
Having said that, Storyblok is not a hosting platform or a service that allows you to set your website up and running. There are many options if you want to host a web application, like using web servers, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), or even create serverless applications.
You can use the data managed by Storyblok in websites, mobile applications, and other platforms like virtual reality devices. As we want to make your work as easy as possible, Storyblok as a Software-as-a-Service solution is hosted on servers managed by our team instead of being a self-hosted service.

Specifically, our services are stored on Amazon AWS, which assures data hosting security in accordance with the highest compliance standards on the market. The hosting environment is protected by a WAF (Web Application Firewall), which secures APIs and web applications from threads, exploits, and cyber abuses. Moreover, our customers and partners can choose the hosting location - Europe, United States, Canada or Australia. There is also an option for separated infrastructure in Mainland China.

Storing data on AWS

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud with data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, and Australia.
Storyblok is using AWS for a few reasons: agility and instant elasticity, openness and flexibility, and security, having multiple layers of operational and physical security.

What is a CDN and how it delivers content

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to where users are. Data centers across the globe use caching, a process that temporarily stores copies of files in multiple geographic locations, so that you can access internet content from a web-enabled device or browser more quickly through a server near you.

The speed of content delivery can significantly impact performance and security. By using a content delivery network (CDN) you can simplify content delivery to locations around the world, increasing performance and also providing better Google Lighthouse scores, which impacts how well content is received by customers, SEO ranking, and more.
At Storyblok we are using Amazon CloudFront as our content delivery network. As mentioned, content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers which cache content more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content. For other resources such as our images, we’re using our Image Service so we can automatically crop, resize, and optimize all our assets.

Expansion to APAC

Starting in October 2022 we initiated an expansion into APAC. This represents an important milestone for Storyblok and we are fully committed to invest heavily in this region.

Based on our survey in Australia and Singapore we recorded the following insights:

• Only 13% of APAC companies are happy with their monolithic CMSs
• 46% are considering moving to a headless CMS
• The CMS features that are most important: #1 Security, #2 Website speed, #3 Easy to use for content creators
• 61% are worried about the security of their CMS
• 67% use 2 or more CMSs
• 68% deliver content in more than one language
• 12% are using their CMS to deliver content in virtual reality, and 9% in augmented reality

We are aware that data sovereignty and residency regulations in Australia require some data to be held on shore. Depending on the security requirements of the data, there may also be a requirement for the data to be held in an IRAP (Information Registered Assessors Program) certified repository. There are only a handful of such certified providers. Storyblok has indicated that it’s possible to build a dedicated instance of data repository onshore, which will make it easier for Government and even Banking use cases to take advantage of our CMS.

Conclusions

From a performance perspective there are no issues to where your data is stored. We use global cache endpoints and they enable your users to have access to your content from anywhere and experience seamless digital journeys.
From the point of view of data sovereignty, Storyblok is not holding on to user data, except sign-in credentials of customer approved Storyblok creators and developers.