Glossary
Data residency
The requirement that data remains within a specific country or jurisdiction.
Regulated Indian sectors frequently require that data stays inside India. That constrains which model providers and regions are usable.
Options are Indian cloud regions with a provider that supports them, or self-hosted open-weight models where the requirement is absolute.
It is worth separating the requirement from the assumption. Some teams treat residency as absolute when the actual obligation permits processing in-region with a cloud provider, which opens up considerably better options. Getting legal to state the requirement precisely usually widens the shortlist.
Check whether the requirement is residency or sovereignty, because they are not the same. Residency is about where data physically sits; sovereignty is about whose law can compel access to it, and only the second rules out a foreign-owned provider operating locally.
Related terms, in context
The concepts you almost always meet alongside data residency.
- DPDP Act
- India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the law governing personal data in Indian AI systems.
- Open-weight models
- Models whose parameters you can download and run yourself, on your own infrastructure.
- AI governance
- The controls, documentation and evidence that let an AI system pass an audit.
Where this shows up in our work
Data residency is not an abstraction for us. It is a decision we make on live projects. It shows up most directly in ai governance & compliance, ai infrastructure & mlops, where getting it wrong has a cost someone can measure.
If you are evaluating a vendor on this, the useful question is not whether they can define the term. It is what they measure, what they would refuse to do, and what happens in their system when the assumption behind data residency stops holding.
Questions
What is Data residency?
The requirement that data remains within a specific country or jurisdiction.
Does Orqent Labs build this?
Yes, AI Governance & Compliance and AI Infrastructure & MLOps. We work across India, covering all 19,238 PIN codes remotely.
Building something that involves data residency?
We will tell you honestly whether it is the right approach for your problem.
Or email bd@dtrasglobal.com · call +91 74118 77878