Glossary · Australian Compliance
Data Residency
The requirement or choice to store and process data within a specific geographic jurisdiction, such as Australia.
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Data residency means storing and processing data within a defined geographic boundary. Data sovereignty is the related but distinct concept that the laws of the country where data sits apply to it. For Australian businesses the two often run together. Data stored in Australia is subject to Australian law and is not subject to the US CLOUD Act or other foreign access regimes in the same way as data on overseas servers. Relevant controls include selecting cloud regions (Sydney, ap-southeast-2), using local self hosted deployments (n8n, open source models) and understanding whether a SaaS vendor processes data offshore even if they store it locally.
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