EU Data Residency
EU data residency means that personal and business data is stored and processed only within the European Union, protecting it from extraterritorial access under non-EU laws such as the US CLOUD Act.
Definition
EU data residency is a contractual and technical guarantee that data — at rest, in transit, and during processing — never leaves the European Union. It typically means the cloud infrastructure, operational teams, support personnel, and subprocessors all operate within the EU. Stronger forms of the guarantee, sometimes called EU data sovereignty, additionally ensure that no EU-hosted data is accessible to non-EU parent companies or governments through legal instruments like the US CLOUD Act.
Why it matters
Following the Schrems II ruling (2020) that invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield, European organizations face legal uncertainty when processing personal data on US-owned cloud infrastructure. Regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, public sector) increasingly require EU-only processing as a procurement condition. EU data residency reduces cross-border transfer complexity and aligns with national security and digital-sovereignty priorities.
How Volentis.ai handles it
Volentis.ai hosts all customer data exclusively in EU datacenters in Germany and the Netherlands. No data replicates, transits, or is processed outside the EU. On single-tenant or customer-managed deployments, customers can additionally enforce keep-in-region constraints at infrastructure level and bring their own encryption keys (BYOK).