IBM Corp. says it’s giving its Frankfurt-based cloud data center in Germany a facelift in order to provide customers with greater control over where their data lives, who has access to it and what they can do with this access.

The idea is to help IBM’s cloud customers adhere to the new General Data Protection Regulation that’s set to be enforced in the European Union starting next May. Under the GDPR rules, any company that operates in the EU will be required to protect data belonging to European citizens and be aware of where it’s flowing in their systems at all times. Companies could be hit by massive fines if they fail to meet the requirements.

With that in mind, IBM said today that it’s adding new controls for IBM Cloud in Frankfurt that ensure client content, including personal data, can only be accessed by IBM employees based in the EU. The company said these staffers will play an important role, as they’ll be tasked with reviewing and approving all changes to data made by non-EU-based employees.

“Clients will review and approve all non-EU access requests to their content if an instance requires support or access from a non-EU based employee,” Sebastien Krause, general manager of IBM Cloud Europe, said in a blog post. “If granted, this access is temporary and the client will be notified when the temporary access is revoked.”

Big Blue is also hiring more staff for its customer support teams in Europe so it can provide around the clock support in the region.

IBM also said it has designed a new support model for the Frankfurt data center that should ensure data is “technically restricted” to the EU at all times. It said this new support model, designed to ensure GDPR compliance, will be applied to the full cloud architecture stack, including higher-value services such as Artificial Intelligence and DevOps.

Finally, beginning in 2018, IBM will introduce new capabilities that allow customers to encrypt data both at rest and in transit using their own master keys. Because customers retain possession of these keys themselves, the data remains inaccessible to unauthorized users, including IBM itself.

“IBM’s commitment to data responsibility and the added controls in the IBM Cloud in Europe allow us to trust IBM to protect our most valuable data,” said Patrick Palacin, cofounder and chief technology officer at TeleClinic GmbH, an IBM Cloud customer.

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