# Data Residency

> Data residency is where data physically lives and under whose jurisdiction: which country, which cloud region, and whose tenant. For AI systems it extends to prompts, outputs and telemetry, and it determines which regulators, laws and customers a deployment can satisfy.

- Part of: [The Sentry AI Transformation Glossary](https://sentrysolutions.ai/glossary)
- Canonical: https://sentrysolutions.ai/glossary/data-residency

For New Zealand and Australian businesses the question is increasingly concrete. Boards, regulators and enterprise customers ask where the data sits, and an architecture that keeps it in your own tenant, in your region, answers before the question is asked.

AI adds a wrinkle SaaS never had: the valuable data is not only what you store but what your team types into prompts every day. Residency thinking has to cover the AI traffic too, which is an architecture decision, made early or made expensively.

## Related terms

- [AI Agent Governance](https://sentrysolutions.ai/glossary/ai-governance)
- [AI Operating System](https://sentrysolutions.ai/glossary/ai-operating-system)