How n8n Keeps Every Byte Inside Your Firewall

Picture this: your security team just vetoed another SaaS because “customer data can’t leave the EU.”
Your CFO is already sweating over potential GDPR fines.
The only dev who maintained your on-prem ETL just handed in their badge.
You still have 200+ API-driven workflows to run tomorrow morning.
What do you do?

You spin up n8n—self-hosted—before your coffee gets cold.

100% Data Residency, Out of the Box

• Workflows, credentials, execution logs, and payloads live on your disk, your VPC, and your legal jurisdiction.
• No outbound telemetry, no phone-home analytics, and no third-party sub-processors.
• If the regulation says “data must stay in Frankfurt,” you simply run the container in Frankfurt—problem solved.

Bring Your Own Encryption (and Keys)

• n8n encrypts credentials at rest with AES-256.
• Need to wrap that with your own KMS or an HSM? Fork the node, point to your key—done.
• Require TLS 1.3 plus mutual mTLS to Postgres? Add three environment variables; the container restarts in seconds.

Audit Trails That Auditors Actually Praise

• Flip EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_MANUAL and LOG_LEVEL=info generate a tamper-evident JSON line for every node that fires.
• Stream the logs to Splunk, Elastic, or Loki; correlate them in your SIEM; archive cold-line to WORM S3 for seven years.
• Because the logger is open-source, you can prove nothing is hidden or filtered—useful when regulators ask questions.

GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA Switches for Data Retention

• Set locale and timezone variables so timestamps match local court time.
• Use the built-in “Delete executions older than X days” cron to enforce retention limits—no custom scripts required.
• Right to be forgotten? Hit the public REST endpoint /execution/:id or delete the user row in Postgres; cascading deletes every related trace.

Air-Gapped Option for the Truly Paranoid

• Build the image on an internal CI runner, sign it with Cosign, and push it to your private artifact repo.
• Deploy via Helm into a Kubernetes namespace that has zero egress except kube-dns.
• Mirror npm/Python packages to Artifactory—your workflows still install community nodes, but the firewall never opens.

Don’t Want to Patch Postgres at 2 a.m.?

No problem—n8n Cloud is the identical codebase on someone else’s pager.
All traffic is TLS 1.3, data is encrypted at rest with AES-256 through a managed KMS, and you can still choose the region (EU-central, US-east, or Singapore).
You lose the “my disk only” badge, but you keep the no-ops lifestyle and still beat Zapier on price per execution.

Many teams run a hybrid stack: sensitive KYC workflows stay on-prem, while marketing automations live in n8n Cloud—both managed from the same Git repository.

Bottom Line

If your compliance checklist includes phrases like “data sovereignty,” “custom encryption,” or “EU data residency,” n8n’s self-hosted option lets you tick every box with a single command—no boilerplate code required.
And if tomorrow you hire a DevOps engineer who hates backups, you can promote the same workflows to n8n Cloud in two clicks.

Freedom first, convenience when you need it—that’s the n8n promise.