Data residency

Data residency refers to where data is physically or legally stored and processed, and to requirements, whether contractual, regulatory, or self-imposed, that keep it within a specific country or region. A company might commit that European customer data stays on servers located in the EU, or that a client's data never leaves a named cloud region.

Data residency is closely related to, but narrower than, data sovereignty: residency is about the physical or contractual location of data, while sovereignty extends to which country's laws actually govern it, which can differ from where it sits, for example if a foreign-headquartered provider hosts data locally but remains subject to its home country's laws. Requirements often originate from regulations like General Data Protection Regulation, from government contracts, or from customer demands in regulated industries.

Residency matters for analytics teams because it constrains architecture directly: which cloud regions a warehouse can run in, whether data can be replicated for disaster recovery elsewhere, and whether a single global dashboard can pull rows from every region into one place. It's typically tracked as part of data governance and informed by data classification, since residency requirements usually apply to specific categories of personally identifiable information rather than everything an organization holds. Requirements vary significantly by jurisdiction and contract, so specific obligations should be confirmed rather than assumed.