Federated GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure
Designed a compliant architecture that unblocked US expansion without compromising GDPR.
Fabriq.tech is a French B2B SaaS company for factory operations management with over €750k MRR. As the company prepared for US expansion, it faced a structural data problem: its existing infrastructure did not account for data residency requirements, meaning a significant portion of its data could not legally be used across borders.
Design a data infrastructure architecture that would support US market expansion while maintaining full GDPR compliance, including data residency controls and automated quality guarantees.
The infrastructure problem at Fabriq had two distinct layers. The first was geographic: like Intercom, Fabriq operated across multiple regions with different data residency requirements, and the existing infrastructure had no compliant architecture for handling cross-border data access. The second was more unusual: certain enterprise clients required their Fabriq instances to run on completely dedicated private infrastructure — no shared compute, no shared storage, fully isolated from other clients. This meant the federation architecture had to handle not just geographic data boundaries, but client-level infrastructure isolation as well.
The solution was a federated layer that could surface non-sensitive data from any number of separate environments — geographic or client-level — into a unified analytics layer. Critically, it also included a low-code declarative configuration model so the engineering team could onboard a new client's dedicated infrastructure without modifying ETL pipelines each time.
- 01Mapped the full landscape of data boundaries: geographic residency requirements, client-level infrastructure isolation contracts, and which data could be surfaced compliantly into a unified layer.
- 02Designed the federated architecture: a unified analytics layer capable of ingesting non-sensitive data from both regional deployments and isolated per-client infrastructure environments.
- 03Built the declarative configuration model — a low-code system allowing the engineering team to register a new client infrastructure and have it automatically included in federation without pipeline changes.
- 04Implemented automated pipeline-level tests to enforce residency and isolation rules at ingestion, catching violations at the source rather than downstream.
- 05Validated the full architecture against GDPR requirements and client contractual obligations before any production data began flowing through the federated layer.
- 06Documented the compliance architecture for legal, engineering, and client-facing teams, including the data lineage needed to demonstrate compliance to auditors.
- US expansion unblocked from a data infrastructure perspective
- 20% of previously restricted cross-border data made available through compliant federated architecture
- Enterprise clients with dedicated private infrastructure onboarded via low-code configuration — no pipeline changes required per client
- Automated quality testing introduced across the pipeline, enforcing residency and isolation rules at ingestion
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