Data Residency

Data residency is the requirement that specified data be stored or processed within a particular geography — a country, a trade bloc, or a set of approved regions. It arises from privacy law, sector regulation, and contractual promises to customers.

Residency is more than choosing a region at deploy time. Support access, backups, disaster recovery replicas, telemetry, and CDN caches can all move data across borders. A provider claiming residency compliance should state clearly which services keep data in-region and which do not.

For architects, the practical questions are: which of my data is actually regulated, which services replicate outside the region by default, and what documentation will an auditor accept. Providers with published data-handling maps and per-service residency controls make this answerable; the rest make it a discovery project.