CONCEPT Cited by 3 sources

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)

Seen in

• sources/2026-08-13-aws-recovery-strategies-to-meet-data-residency-requirements — distinguishes national, pan-national EU, and single-Region residency cases; defines three recovery strategies with progressively tighter data/control locality.
• sources/2026-07-28-atlassian-scaling-streamhub-transitioning-from-kinesis-to-kafka — pre-approves companion regions inside a compliant boundary for streaming failover.
• sources/2026-08-10-cloudflare-serving-the-most-critical-missions-cloudflare-for-government — meets US-only residency for FedRAMP High via software-defined regionality on a single global network (Data Localization Suite pins all processing to U.S. data centers) rather than a separate region — the software-enforced end of the residency spectrum.
• sources/2026-09-29-databricks-your-data-your-storage-your-rules-a-2026-guide-to-storing-un — residency via per-catalog/schema physical storage placement. For Unity Catalog managed tables, logical org (catalogs/schemas) + ABAC alone "satisfies standard GDPR data segregation requirements"; but when a boundary must extend into the physical storage — "regional and regulatory rules might dictate where certain data physically resides" — you give a specific catalog/schema its own managed storage location so "the physical placement of the data lines up with the boundary that requires it." Distinct from the strict-vs-cryptographic recovery axis above: here the residency lever is the catalog's control over which customer-owned bucket the data lands in (data-plane physical placement), decoupled from the control plane.

Related

• cryptographic-boundary-recovery — encrypted recovery copy outside the source geography
• data-boundary-recovery — local data plane paired with an external parent control plane
• strict-local-autonomy-recovery — keep data and recovery operations local
• concepts/control-plane-data-plane-separation — the distinction that makes residency claims precise