Data residency in Germany, but IP in Netherlands

[Matthias Limbacher]

Hi *

we were happy to see that data residency in Germany was made possible and we switched a few weeks ago.

However, a colleague pinged the IP resolved from our site URL and found out via who is that this IP is located in the netherlands.

Some people here are now alerted about what to think about data residency and I could not give an appropriate answer.

Could you please give an insight why we see a Dutch IP address.

Thanks
Matthias

[Charlie Misonne · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthias,

Checking the location of an IP address is not the right way check for data residency. But I understand some users my think this is the way to go.

Where your IP is located has little to do with where the location of the physical harddisks are.
Personally I do not know how Atlassian manages IPs, DNS and network traffic. All I know is they use AWS infrastucture and your data would be in a German Amazon data center.

The accuracy of IP location is questionable. Several online services keep a database of IP address locations and they will sometimes report different information. For example: I checked the IP of my own Atlassian Cloud instance and ran it through this service: https://www.iplocation.net/ip-lookup. 3 databases tell me the IP is from the Netherlands, 5 tell me it is from Germany.
Perhaps some of these databases do not reflect recent information.
Atlassian has a range of IP addresses they can use and they probably use them accross countries and sites. I doubt they use a single IP per Atlassian site or customer.

Related article: IP addresses and domains for Atlassian cloud products 

To check your data residency setting go to admin.atlassian.com -> select your organization -> Security -> Data residency

If you are still having doubts about this you can contact Atlassian.

[Matthias Limbacher]

Okay, I was thinking of a similar argumentation. So this was great help - thanks!