Data residency

Data residency describes where data physically lives and is processed. A data residency requirement says that certain data, often personal, health or financial information, must stay within a given country or region. A data residency promise is a provider telling you where your data will go and where it will not.

It is related to, but not the same as, two other ideas:

• Data sovereignty: which country's laws apply to the data. Data stored in one country can still be reachable by the laws of another, depending on who operates the service.
• Data retention: how long data is kept. A provider can process data in the right country and still keep copies for months. See zero data retention.

Why it matters

Organisations handling sensitive text, such as patient messages, HR cases or insurance claims, often have contractual, regulatory or simply reputational reasons to keep that text out of other jurisdictions. Laws such as the Swiss nFADP and the EU GDPR set rules for transferring personal data abroad, so knowing where every processing step happens is part of doing the paperwork properly.

Residency has to cover the whole path, not only the database: the servers that run the model, any failover region, and the logs. A service that stores data locally but silently fails over to another continent under load does not really keep data resident.

Data residency in Laya Studio

Laya Studio's primary inference pool runs on GPUs located in Switzerland, and every API response reports where it was processed in the x-laya-region header. With Swiss-only mode (a workspace switch, or the x-laya-residency: ch header per request), requests are only ever answered in Switzerland: if the Swiss pool is unavailable you get an error, never a silent detour abroad. Account data lives in a Postgres database in the AWS Zurich region. You remain responsible for your own legal basis for processing personal data. Full details are on the Swiss data residency page.