The practice of copying data or resources across multiple geographic regions for disaster recovery, low-latency access, or compliance requirements. Like having backup copies of important documents in different cities, regional replication ensures data survives regional outages. AWS S3 Cross-Region Replication, Azure Geo-Redundant Storage, Google Cloud multi-regional storage, and OCI Cross-Region Replication all provide this capability.
A financial services company replicates their database from US-East to EU-West using AWS RDS Read Replicas or Azure SQL Geo-Replication, ensuring European users get low-latency access and meeting GDPR data residency requirements.
All four offerings replicate object storage data to a different geographic region to improve durability and disaster recovery. AWS and OCI use explicit replication rules/policies; Azure uses account-level redundancy options (GRS/RA-GRS); GCP uses dual-region/multi-region bucket placement to keep copies in separate locations for higher availability and lower latency to users in multiple areas.