# Data Residency & Data Regions

> Source: https://agilitycms.com/docs/owners-admins/data-residency-and-data-regions

Agility Content (the management and content APIs) stores each instance's data at rest in a single customer-selected data region, hosted on Microsoft Azure. Five regions are available — **US North Central, US East, Canada Central, West Europe, and Australia** — and an instance provisioned in a given region keeps its structured content, metadata, and media assets at rest within that region's Azure data centres. Organizations with Canadian data-residency requirements can provision in **Canada Central**, keeping content data at rest in Canada. Data-at-rest residency is distinct from delivery: Agility's global edge/CDN layer caches and serves *copies* of published content close to end users worldwide, and that delivery layer is **not** bound by the content-storage region.

![Data residency: structured content and assets stay encrypted at rest in one selected region, while published content is distributed as transient copies across a global edge network.](https://cdn.aglty.io/agility-cms-docs/images/owners-admins/diagram-data-residency.svg)

## Available data regions

An Agility instance is provisioned into one of five Azure regions. The region determines where the instance's system-of-record data lives at rest.

| Region | Area |
| --- | --- |
| US North Central | United States |
| US East | United States |
| Canada Central | Canada |
| West Europe | Europe |
| Australia | Australia |

The data region is **selected when the instance is provisioned**. It can be changed later, but moving an instance to a different region requires planning time and a statement of work. Organizations with strict residency requirements should therefore select the appropriate region at the outset.

## What is stored, and where

Agility runs on Microsoft Azure. **All of an instance's data resides in the selected region** — including structured content and metadata (content items, models, pages, users, workflow state, version history) and uploaded media/file assets. The system of record for an instance stays at rest in that one region.

## Data-at-rest residency guarantee

Content data at rest remains in the region selected at provisioning, and is encrypted at rest (see *Hosting, Security & Compliance* for encryption and key-management detail). **Disaster-recovery replication stays within the same broader regional (country) boundary** — for example, a Canada Central instance is replicated within Canada (to Canada East) — so backups and DR copies do not leave the residency boundary (see *Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity*).

## Edge delivery is a separate layer (not bound by content residency)

Agility delivers published content and assets through a globally distributed edge/CDN layer. When an end user requests content, the response is served from — and cached at — the edge location nearest them, anywhere in the world. This is a **delivery and caching layer**, not the system of record:

- The authoritative copy of content remains at rest in the selected region.
- Edge nodes hold **transient cached copies** of *published* content to reduce latency; they are not a durable store.
- Because delivery is global by design, the fact that an instance stores data in Canada Central does **not** mean cached copies are served only from Canada. Performance for global audiences depends on global edge presence.

For Canadian public-sector-adjacent requirements, the key distinction to communicate is: **data-at-rest residency (Canada Central) is guaranteed at the storage layer; content *delivery* is global.** The platform's global edge/CDN delivery **cannot be geographically restricted at this time** — published content is cached and served from edge locations worldwide. Where a requirement mandates that delivered/cached copies stay within a specific country, that constraint has to be addressed at the **customer's own front-end CDN and delivery architecture**, not the platform delivery layer. See *Content Delivery & CDN Architecture*.

## Shared responsibilities

| Area | Agility | Implementation partner / customer |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Storage region of the content system of record | Provisions and operates the instance in the selected Azure region; keeps data at rest in-region | Selects the correct region at provisioning to meet residency requirements |
| Encryption at rest | Provided by the Azure platform | — |
| Front-end hosting region | — | Chooses where the customer's website/app and *their own* CDN run, which determines where delivered copies are cached |
| Delivery-residency constraints (if any) | Operates the platform edge layer | Validates whether delivery-residency (not just storage-residency) is required, and designs the front-end/CDN to enforce it |