Data residency
Data residency is the physical or jurisdictional location where an organization’s data is stored — a deliberate infrastructure choice, distinct from data sovereignty, which concerns whose laws govern that data regardless of where it sits.
Privacy law
Residency is an operational fact: which country or region the servers and backups physically live in. Organizations choose residency for latency, regulatory alignment, or customer expectation — a company promising EU data residency commits to keeping storage and processing within EU/EEA borders, which simplifies GDPR cross-border-transfer analysis because there’s no border being crossed for that data flow.
Residency alone doesn’t fully answer where legal authority reaches; a server physically located in one country can still be subject to another country’s law if the operating company is headquartered elsewhere and subject to extraterritorial legal process — that broader question is data sovereignty. Residency is nonetheless the practical lever most organizations can control directly, since it’s a hosting decision rather than a matter of corporate domicile.
Ciphera stores customer data in Switzerland, on Exoscale in Zurich (availability zone CH-DK-2), and keeps its backups in Switzerland too, at Infomaniak. That is data residency chosen specifically for Switzerland’s data protection regime (the FADP) and the EU’s adequacy recognition of it, independent of Ciphera BV’s own incorporation in Belgium.