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Data residency

Definition

Data residency constrains the legal or contractual geography in which business data may be stored, processed, recovered, or made accessible. For recovery design, it is not one binary rule: the relevant boundary can apply separately to ciphertext placement, plaintext decryption, physical data-plane location, and administrative control-plane operations. (Source: sources/2026-08-13-aws-recovery-strategies-to-meet-data-residency-requirements)

Recovery-design questions

Before selecting a DR topology, establish which of the following must remain in the approved geography:

  1. Stored data — may encrypted backup copies leave the country or approved jurisdiction?
  2. Plaintext access — who can decrypt a copy, where, and under what recovery authorization?
  3. Data plane — must serving/storage resources physically operate locally?
  4. Control plane — may provisioning, key-policy changes, and recovery administration occur from another Region?

These answers select among a cryptographic, data, or strict-local-autonomy recovery boundary rather than simply choosing a nearby Region.

Relationship to digital sovereignty

Data residency is an important but narrower concern than digital sovereignty. Sovereignty also asks who operates the system, whether infrastructure/control remain autonomous, and whether the workload remains usable during geopolitical or provider-access disruption. A design can meet residency through encrypted foreign-region copies yet still fail an autonomy requirement. (Source: sources/2026-08-13-aws-recovery-strategies-to-meet-data-residency-requirements)

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