Skip to main content

Data spaces — Data 360 reference

Data spaces partition a Data 360 org for a real boundary — brand, region, regulatory regime. What's isolated, what's shared, and why the partition is a wall you build once.

Reference·Last updated 2026-06-01·Drafted by Lira · Edited by German Medina

A data space partitions a Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) org's data and metadata for a real boundary — a brand, a region, a regulatory regime. What lives in one space is mostly isolated from the others, which makes a data space a useful separation tool and a near-permanent commitment: moving data across the wall later is a rebuild, not a setting.

What a data space is

A data space scopes a slice of the org — its data model objects, segments, and the users who can see them — so that work in one space doesn't bleed into another. The common reasons to partition:

By brand       → two brands that must not see each other's customers
By region      → data residency or locale separation (EU vs US)
By regulatory  → a regime (HIPAA, financial) that needs isolation

The default is a single space. Add spaces only when a boundary genuinely demands isolation — every additional space is model and access surface you maintain.

Reference:

What survives in production

Partition for a boundary, not for convenience

The right reason to create a space is a boundary you'll still have in three years. "It feels cleaner to separate the marketing data" is not that boundary — it's a convenience that becomes a wall you engineer around the day marketing and service need the same unified profile. (See gotchas — gotcha 5.)

Disjoint audiences, or one space

If two would-be spaces send to or analyze overlapping audiences, they almost certainly want to be one space. Cross-space work is deliberately constrained; designing for it is a tax you pay on every segment that needs both sides.

The wall is near-permanent

Treat a new data space the way you'd treat a new Business Unit in Marketing Cloud: a decision with a multi-year horizon, because un-walling it later means rebuilding the model and re-pointing every consumer.

Quick decision

Create a new data space when:

  • A regulatory or data-residency boundary legally requires isolation.
  • Two brands must not see each other's customers, with no shared-audience use case.

Stay in one space when:

  • The separation is organizational convenience, not a hard boundary.
  • The audiences overlap, or a unified profile across the "two" is ever useful.

Related