EU-Ready Orchestration: Data Residency, Audit Trails, and AI Act Basics

EU SMEs need AI that’s fast and compliant. The trick is to bake governance into orchestration so audits get easier while shipping gets faster.

Why this matters now

Cross-border data movement, opaque providers, and ad-hoc prompts create avoidable risk. A residency-aware control plane with provenance and access control lets you prove who processed what, where, and under which policy—without grinding delivery to a halt. Think “compliance as a feature,” not a blocker.

What to implement first

Residency & providers: keep data in the EU when possible; maintain a provider allowlist with purpose binding (which task may call which vendor/model).
Provenance & audit: store step inputs/outputs, model name, policy version, approver, and timestamps. Keep immutable logs for critical actions; sign logs and rotate keys.
Access control: workspace-level RBAC; least-privilege to integrations; scoped API keys; periodic access reviews; alerts on anomalous reads/writes.
DPIA quickstart: describe purpose, data categories, processing steps, retention, and controls; map risks → mitigations (PII masking, HITL approvals, rate limits).
Incidents: playbooks for data deletion, provider outage, policy violation; comms templates and SLA timers.

Example / How-to (checklist)

• Policy file: residency = EU, providers_allow = ["eu-provider-A","on-prem"], pii = mask.
• Provenance record: { step, inputs_hash, model, tokens, eval_score, approver, policy_version, ts }.
• Access review: monthly report → who can read PII? any dormant keys? revoke + rotate.
• DPIA bullets: purpose (content planning), categories (names, public profiles), retention (90d artifacts, 365d logs), mitigations (masking, RBAC, HITL), DSR process (export/delete within 30d).

Next steps

• Ship provider allowlist + residency flags in your router.
• Turn on immutable provenance for publish-adjacent steps.
• Run a 30-minute DPIA using the template; close gaps in one sprint.
• Want a copy-paste DPIA + policy starter? Grab the pack or book a working session.