Techniques of federation of data during query time are disclosed herein. One example technique includes upon receiving an indication of interaction of a file by a user of a tenant, determining whether automatic replication of the file to a user shard corresponding to the user is permitted according to a company policy or a legal requirement, the user shard being in a second geographic region. The example technique can then include when automatic replication of the file is not permitted, storing the file in a tenant shard corresponding to the tenant in a network storage in the first geographic region and instead of replicating the file to the user shard in the second geographic region, creating, in the user shard in the second geographic region, a file reference that is a pointer to the file stored in the tenant shard in the network storage in the first geographic region.