Phil Mataras, founder of permanent storage network ar.io
The European Commission has set September 12th as the day when every provision of the European Union (EU) Data Act becomes operational.
Regulators will have the power to demand cryptographic proof of data integrity, transparent access logs, and vendor-agnostic data portability. Non-compliance can result in penalties of up to €20 million or 4% of the company’s global turnover, mirroring the GDPR’s top tier for fines.
Despite this looming deadline, most organizations still rely on centralized cloud infrastructure, which lacks immutability and offers little transparency about where and how the data is stored, with one survey showing that only 59% of firms are deploying immutable storage.
What the Data Act requires
Behind the legal prose lie three concrete technical duties.
1) Immutable Evidence: Organizations must generate immutable evidence of a record’s origin and completeness so that a file opened in 2032 can be proven identical to the one stored in 2025.
2) Customer Security: Article 23 requires cloud providers to offer a fully documented, 30-day switching window that enables customers to migrate all workloads (including metadata) without incurring hidden egress fees or service degradation. A recent Lexology analysis noted that contractual ‘lock-in’ clauses and punitive egress tariffs will likely fall foul of the rules.
3) Radical Transparency: The Act grants users, partners, and regulators a statutory right to inspect who accessed data, when, and from which jurisdiction, and those very same logs must themselves be tamper-proof.
While traditional cloud infrastructure is designed for scale and flexibility, it doesn’t support permanent, immutable data storage.
Administrator privileges still allow silent edits or deletions that break the chain of custody. Replication engines routinely shift data across borders, muddying legal provenance. Worse, cloud-based cold storage billed by the gigabyte can become an open-ended cost. Keep data for 10 years, and the cumulative invoice can quickly balloon to hundreds of dollars; yet, bit rot, accidental overwrites, and ransomware remain real threats.
And crucially, these weaknesses won’t impress an auditor who expects to hash-verify a PDF on demand and confirm that the bytes delivered to an EU resident match the authoritative source.
TLDR: Buckle in now or suffer later.
The Permanent Cloud Toolbox
Arweave replaces the concept of leased cloud space with a permanent, decentralized data layer. At the point of entry sits ArDrive, a desktop and CLI tool that turns compliance teams into permaweb publishers.
Every drag-and-drop upload is automatically hash-stamped, bundled into a single on-chain transaction, and financed in advance. There are no renewals or hidden egress fees to negotiate later.
ArDrive’s pricing page hits the nail on the head by underscoring the model that can stand the test of time: a one-time payment, permanent storage.
Network fees are distributed to hundreds of nodes for multi-jurisdiction replication, resulting in a shareable, permanent URL that can be embedded directly in retention schedules, vendor contracts, or data-processing agreements.
Those raw transaction IDs are cryptographically elegant but complex for humans to remember. Here’s where ArNS, the Arweave Name System, comes into play, enabling users to mint a friendly label that never expires, incurs no renewal fees, and resolves through any AR.IO gateway or the native ar:// protocol.
The official ArNS portal stresses that names never rely on a central authority, eliminating the dreaded 404 page during an audit five years from now.
Finally, the AR.IO Gateway Network guarantees real-world performance. More than 400 stake-weighted edge nodes cache and serve Arweave content, with uptime and latency scored by an on-chain Observation & Incentive protocol that rewards reliable operators.
Since traffic can route through any healthy gateway, regulators conducting a surprise inspection receive reliable speeds even if one host drops offline. The same incentive layer gives the real-time proofs that each permalink remained reachable throughout the retention period.
Because every byte is hard-coded into Arweave’s consensus layer, no administrator, nor even your own CISO, can silently edit or delete evidence.
That single architectural choice satisfies the EU Data Act’s immutable origin clause straight out of the box while eliminating decade-long storage invoices.
The combination of ArDrive for ingestion, ArNS for human-readable discovery, and the AR.IO Gateway Network for delivery forms a permanent cloud network ready to shoulder the strictest European compliance audits from day one.
Fast-track workflow & checklist
- Inventory Data-Act-covered datasets: Flag device telemetry, artificial intelligence (AI) training sets, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) activity logs, and anything else that will be requestable after September 2025.
- Drag and drop to ArDrive: Upload the raw files or encrypted TAR bundles. Pay once; store forever.
- Claim an ArNS name: Select a suitable ArNS name for evidence bundles (e.g., customer-logs-2025q1.ar) so auditors can type, rather than paste, hashes.
- Embed the Perma-URLs: Add the Perma-URLs in your data processing agreements, privacy policies, and vendor contracts. This demonstrates to regulators that you have an exit-ready, tamper-proof archive.
- Set up access-log mirroring: Automatically export cloud-provider API logs or SIEM trails into ArDrive at the end of each day, creating an immutable audit lane that satisfies Articles 15 and 35 of the EU Data Act.
Ready to lock in compliance permanently?
The Data Act isn’t a paper tiger, and as of September 12, supervisors will require every EU-facing firm to demonstrate data integrity, portability, and transparency.
ArDrive, ArNS, and the AR.IO Gateway Network give you a turnkey path to stop saying “one day” and instead say “yes” on day one, without fearing mega-bills or having to recode apps in 2035 if all your data is suddenly lost.
Schedule a 30-minute strategy session with our compliance engineers to see your datasets immortalized on Arweave and benchmarked against the EU Data Act’s toughest clauses. Spaces before the Q4 audit rush are filling fast, so book yours in today and sleep easy in September.
With great permanent storage comes a truly preserved peace of mind.
About Phil Mataras
Phil Mataras is the founder of AR.IO – an Arweave-based permanent cloud network that allows users to store data privately, securely, and permanently, all on a “pay once, store forever” model. A former KPMG digital architect and SharePoint architecture and administration team lead, Phil is passionate about data security, sovereignty and privacy.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-mataras/
Twitter: https://x.com/vilenarios
Source: We Can Lock-In EU Data Act Compliance with Arweave and AR.IO
