Data Residency
The geographic location where data is stored and processed, with regulatory requirements (UK GDPR, sector-specific rules) often constraining where personal or regulated data can travel.
How it works
Data residency matters because the regulatory regime applying to data depends on where it is processed and stored. UK GDPR allows transfers to adequate jurisdictions (currently including the EU and certain other countries) but restricts transfers elsewhere. Sector-specific rules tighten this further: NHS data, MoD data, and certain regulated financial services data have explicit residency requirements. For AI deployment, the practical decisions are: where does the inference happen, where do the embeddings live, and where do logs and prompts get stored. Ayoob AI architects data residency explicitly per workload, defaulting to UK regions for UK clients and to on-premise for clients where any external residency is unacceptable.
Related terms
UK GDPR
The UK's data protection regime as established by the Data Protection Act 2018, retaining the substantive requirements of EU GDPR after Brexit, governing how personal data is collected, processed, stored, and shared.
Private AI
AI deployed on infrastructure the client controls (on-premise, in the client's cloud tenancy, or air-gapped), with no third-party LLM provider in the data path and no inference-time data export.
On-Premise AI
AI deployed on hardware the client owns and operates inside their own data centre or office facility, with no dependency on external cloud or model providers for inference.
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