As the newly appointed IT compliance officer in a multinational corporation, you are conducting a thorough review of the company's contracted cloud service provider (CSP) to ensure adherence to various international data protection and privacy regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and others that are applicable to your industry. Given the complexity of legal requirements across different regions, which specific operational characteristic of the CSP must be scrutinized to ensure that data handling and storage practices comply with these regulations, and why is this characteristic a key factor in regulatory compliance?