Enforce Data Sovereignty Resource Locations Policy

What the Solution Is

The Resource Location Restriction constraint (constraints/gcp.resourceLocations) is a managed organization policy constraint provided by the Organization Policy Service. It allows cloud administrators and governance teams to define an allowlist or denylist of physical locations and value groups where supported Google Cloud resources can be created.

How It Meets the Requirements

• Restricting storage and processing to European boundaries: Setting allowedValues to the value group in:eu-locations ensures that all supported services (including Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Compute Engine) are restricted to European regions and multi-regions.
• Preventing disruption to existing workloads: Organization policies with the gcp.resourceLocations constraint are not retroactive. When the policy is enforced, resources provisioned before the constraint was added will continue to run and perform their functions without immediate disruption.
• Systematic hierarchy-wide enforcement: Applying the constraint at the organization node ensures the rule is automatically inherited across all descendant folders and projects in the resource hierarchy.

Key Advantages and Capabilities

• Value Group support: Using in:eu-locations simplifies governance by dynamically encompassing all current and newly added European regions without requiring manual updates for each new datacenter.
• Broad service support: Natively integrates with key data services such as Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, and Dataplex Universal Catalog.
• Preventative guardrail: Operates as a hard preventative control at the API level, preventing unauthorized resource creation even by principals with high-level IAM permissions (such as Owner or Editor).

Why This Is Optimal

Using native organization policy constraints provides centralized, automated governance that prevents non-compliant provisioning before it occurs. Alternative methods, such as custom scripts or reactive log audits, either fail to prevent deployments or introduce significant management overhead without providing native policy inheritance.