Replication in a cloud environment

A method for operating a replication control module is provided. The method comprises determining that a handover takes place by which a data session exchanged via a cellular network between a serving application instance and a user equipment is transferred from the serving application instance to a target application instance selected from a plurality of application instances located in a cloud environment. The method further includes determining a location of the target application instance in the cloud environment; determining target replica locations of replica of a session state data individually on a per session basis for said data session taking into account the location of the target application instance; and transmitting location information to a data handling module allowing the data handling module to distribute the replica to the determined locations of the target replica locations.