Glossary

Data residency

Also called: Data location · Data localisation · Data region

Data residency is the geographic location where an organization’s data is stored and processed, often chosen to meet laws, contracts or customer expectations.

Residency is about where data physically sits: the data centres holding the database, backups and search indexes. It is related to, but not the same as, data sovereignty, which is about whose laws apply to the data.

Some laws, sector rules and customer contracts require data to stay in a given country or region. When checking a provider, ask whether backups and search indexes stay in the region too, not just the main database, and whether the region can change later.