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Data Residency & Compliance

Regulations like GDPR, and many enterprise customer contracts, require that certain data (EU citizens' personal data, for example) be stored and processed within specific geographic boundaries — a technically secure system that stores everything in the wrong region can still be a compliance failure.

Data residency is about physical/geographic location of storage and processing, distinct from access control — a perfectly access-controlled database in the wrong country can still violate a residency requirement
Multi-region architecture (routing a customer's data to a specific region's infrastructure based on their residency requirement) is the standard technical approach, and needs to cover backups and logs, not just the primary database
A single global database with 'everyone's data in one place' is fundamentally incompatible with strict residency requirements — the architecture has to be region-aware from early on, since retrofitting it later is a major migration
Sub-processors (third-party services your own backend calls — analytics tools, email providers, support platforms) inherit the same residency obligations, and need the same regional awareness

Hands-on demo

Store a customer's data

Pick a residency region, then check whether a connected logging tool quietly routes data somewhere else.

Try it yourself

Try it yourself — run a scenario below, then flip this and replay it to see what changes.

EU Customer Data Routed to EU Infrastructure

A customer's residency requirement is honored automatically based on their account configuration.

Want this flow explained in detail as it plays?

app.flowground.dev/settings

Account settings

Data region

EU
Customer
App
This preference is stored on the organization's account settings.

Selected hop

Customer signs up and selects 'EU' as their data residency region

Customer

The paying user interacting with the storefront or support flow.

App

The application's backend — enforces business rules and decides what every request is allowed to do.

What happens here

This preference is stored on the organization's account settings.