Data residency concerns where data physically resides. Requirements may arise from law, from client contracts, or from a client's own regulatory obligations, and they can extend to backups and disaster recovery locations as well as primary storage.
Cloud vendors typically offer region selection, though support services and subprocessors may still operate elsewhere.
Alternative Names:
Data Localization, Data Location
Why it Matters?
Residency commitments frequently break at the edges rather than the center. A vendor may host data in a designated region while its support team, monitoring tools, or underlying AI model provider operates from another, which means the data leaves the region in practice. The diligence question is whether residency covers processing and support access, not just storage.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Does data residency cover support access?
Do backups have to stay in region?
