Answers
CODE GxP

Does pharma data have to stay in the EU?

Not automatically — GDPR permits transferring personal data outside the EU under specific legal mechanisms, but many pharmaceutical companies choose EU hosting anyway for personal or health data as the simplest way to avoid the added compliance overhead those mechanisms require.

In detail

What the actual rule is, and why EU hosting is still common

The legal answer

GDPR does not require EU data residency as a blanket rule. Transfers outside the EU are permitted via adequacy decisions, standard contractual clauses, or other approved mechanisms. This is a legal determination for your data protection officer, not a technical default we would apply.

Why companies host in the EU anyway

Standard contractual clauses and adequacy assessments add real legal and operational overhead, particularly for health data, which GDPR treats as a special category with extra protection. Many companies decide that hosting within the EU is simply the lower-friction choice rather than managing that overhead on an ongoing basis.

What we build to

We host and configure infrastructure to whatever data residency requirement your DPO specifies, EU or otherwise — see website security and GDPR and consent for how that gets implemented technically.

Related questions

Does this apply to a professional portal specifically?

Yes, and often more strictly than a general marketing site, since a professional portal typically holds identifiable data about named healthcare professionals rather than anonymous visitors. See HCP portal for how data residency requirements are typically factored into that kind of build from the outset.

Who decides our specific requirement?

Your data protection officer and legal counsel decide the specific requirement, not the development team — we build to whatever data residency and processing rules they specify for the markets involved. This should be confirmed before the technical architecture is finalised, since retrofitting it later is more costly.

Does this affect analytics data too?

Potentially, depending on which analytics tool is used and how it processes and stores visitor data, since some tools transfer data outside the EU by default. See is Google Analytics GDPR compliant for how that specific question is typically assessed and what configuration changes can address it.

Does using a CDN with servers outside the EU create a problem?

It can, depending on whether the CDN caches or merely routes traffic through non-EU nodes, and on the specific safeguards the provider has in place. This is a question for your data protection officer to confirm against the CDN’s data processing agreement rather than an assumption to make either way.

CODE GxP

Build to your actual
data residency requirement

Tell us what your DPO has specified and we will tell you how we would implement it.

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