What is data residency?
Data residency is the geographic location where data is stored and processed, usually set by law, contract or internal policy. It covers every copy of the data, including backups and logs, not only the main database.
Written by Ugo Balducci. Last updated
What data residency means
Data residency is the answer to a simple question: in which country does this data physically live? Organisations set it for several reasons. A law may require certain records to stay in the country. A client contract may forbid storage abroad. A professional secrecy rule, such as article 321 of the Swiss Criminal Code for doctors and lawyers, may make foreign storage a risk the organisation does not want to carry.
Residency applies to every copy. The main database is the obvious one, but files, search indexes, backups, replicas, application logs and support exports are copies too. A service that keeps your database in Zurich and your backups elsewhere does not meet a Swiss residency requirement.
Why it matters when choosing where software runs
Many SaaS vendors offer a region setting, but the setting can cover only part of the data. Backups, analytics or support tooling can run in another country. When you compare providers, ask where each type of copy lives, whether the location is written into the contract, and what happens before data is moved.
Residency is also not the whole story. The location of a server says nothing about which authorities can compel its operator. That is the question of data sovereignty and of laws such as the CLOUD Act.
How Pilae handles it
You choose the location: your premises, or dedicated machines in any of 12 Pilae Cloud regions: six in Switzerland and the EU, with Zurich the default for Swiss data, and six worldwide for teams that need them. New locations can be provisioned on request. Data, backups and logs stay in the region you choose, backups go to a second site in the same jurisdiction, and your contract names the region. A hybrid deployment places each app where its data needs to be.
App data, files, logs and backups stay in the country you choose. Daily encrypted offsite backups go to a target in that same country, and a restore test runs every month and is recorded in the console. Logs stay on the machines that produced them; the console reads them on demand instead of shipping them elsewhere.
Your contract names the location of every machine and every backup target, and data does not move to another country without your written agreement. The full commitments are on the data residency page.