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Choosing where your phone system runs: data centres and local rules

· 6 min read · Vocivo team

A phone system holds more personal data than most people expect: call records, recordings, transcripts, voicemail, text messages and contacts. Where that data lives can matter to your customers and to the rules you work under. Vocivo lets you choose.

Two ways to run Vocivo

Hosted on Vocivo, in the data centre you pick

When you create a workspace you choose a provider and a region, such as DigitalOcean in Frankfurt or AWS in Bahrain. Your workspace then lives in one Vocivo stack in that region: people, calls, recordings, messages and meetings stay there.

Vocivo's central service keeps only what it needs to route a sign-in: which region a workspace lives in, and a keyed hash of each user's email address. The addresses themselves and your tenant data are not copied to it.

Self-hosted on your own server

You install Vocivo on an Ubuntu 24.04 server you control, in your own premises or with a cloud provider you choose. Vocivo supplies the software, the licence and the push relay that wakes sleeping phones. Licence check-ins carry instance metadata, and wake-ups carry a device token and minimal call information. Call records, recordings, contacts and messages stay on your server.

The Gulf, region by region

For companies in the GCC the regions to know are:

  • AWS Middle East (Bahrain), me-south-1
  • AWS Middle East (UAE), me-central-1
  • AWS Saudi Arabia, which AWS expects to open in December 2026

Vocivo offers hosted regions on request while capacity is set up, so ask sales about the one you need.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law governs how personal data is processed and when it may be transferred outside the Kingdom. Telecommunications services are regulated by the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST). Two practical consequences for a phone system:

  • Your carrier must be licensed in the Kingdom. With Vocivo it is: you bring your own trunk from a SIP trunk provider licensed in Saudi Arabia, and that provider deals only with you.
  • Your data location is your decision. Until the AWS Saudi region opens, a company that needs data inside the Kingdom can self-host on a server there. A company whose advisers are content with storage in Bahrain or the UAE can be hosted there today, and move later.

The UAE

In the UAE, internet calling to the public phone network goes through operators licensed by the TDRA. As in Saudi Arabia, the carrier side of Vocivo is your own contract with a licensed operator. The me-central-1 region keeps data in the country.

Beyond the rules: sound quality

Distance adds delay. Place your phone system near your carrier's network and your people. A Riyadh team on a Saudi trunk hosted in Bahrain has a short hop; the same team hosted in Oregon would hear it.

Questions to settle before you choose

  1. Which of your data counts as personal data under your local law, and may it leave the country?
  2. Do your customers' contracts say where call recordings may be stored?
  3. How long must you keep call records, and who may see them?
  4. Where is your carrier's network, and where are most of your people?
  5. Do you have someone to run a server, or would you rather Vocivo did?

If you pick a region now and your needs change, you can ask to move. Moving a workspace between data centres is handled by Vocivo's team today.