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Why this matters

"Where is my data?" is the central sovereignty question. Most cloud providers answer it with a regional dropdown — implicitly asserting the location without distinguishing operator claim from verified reality. For sovereignty buyers under audit, that distinction matters.

The four confidence grades

Probed — green pin, highest confidence

The platform actively queried the provider's own API and received a verified region back. Examples: AWS region via STS GetCallerIdentity, GCP region via metadata service. The provider itself has confirmed the location.

Declared — amber pin, medium confidence

The operator typed a region on the Connexions page. The value is what the operator asserts, not what the API confirms. Useful but not evidence.

Observed — blue dashed pin, low confidence

Neither probe nor declaration was available. The platform fell back to the last credible traceroute hop with a country attribution. Best-effort inference.

Country-only — orange pin, very low confidence

Only a country code is known. The pin renders at the country centroid with an explicit tooltip warning that the location is country-level, not actual data location.

Unknown — no pin

No location data exists. The trace renders without a destination pin rather than fabricating a location.

Why this design choice

Implementing this hierarchy was a deliberate trade-off. It would have been simpler to display every endpoint with a single uniform pin. But uniform display would conceal the difference between "AWS API confirmed this is ca-central-1" and "we guessed because of an old traceroute". Auditors and compliance officers need that distinction; sovereignty buyers expect it.

Operationally

The same hierarchy applies uniformly across the SkyeMap, per-file flyout maps, signed sovereignty reports, and the Sovereignty Command Center. One canonical endpoint-resolution function shared by every surface that renders provider geography. The signed reports include the confidence grade per endpoint — auditors can see which residency claims rest on verified evidence vs. operator assertion.

The trust posture

This is what "making sovereignty operationally enforceable" means — knowing which assertions are evidence and which are claims, and surfacing the difference visually.

Related terms

See also

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