Multi-Region Data Residency Guide

What is data residency?

Data residency controls where conversation transcripts are stored — which country or region the servers that hold your chat data are located in.

For organizations operating in regulated industries or regions (healthcare, financial services, Canadian government suppliers, GDPR-covered EU operations), regulators or internal policies may require that conversation data remain within specific national borders.

Which regions are supported?

How does data residency work?

Velaro uses Azure Cosmos DB (regional instances) as an immutable transcript archive. When a conversation is resolved, it is archived to the Cosmos DB instance for its assigned region.

Live conversation data (active messages, agent assignments) stays in SQL during the conversation. Once resolved, the full transcript is written to the regional Cosmos DB. The SQL record is retained for operational purposes (inbox filtering, reporting metadata) but the conversation content archive is regional.

Priority chain for region assignment:

1. Deployment data region — if the widget embed (deployment) has a data region set, all conversations starting from that widget use that region

2. Team data region — if the team receiving the conversation has a data region set, that region is used

3. Default: United States — if neither is set, conversations archive to the US instance

This means a Canadian customer can embed a widget on their site, set that deployment's data region to ca, and all conversations from Canadian visitors will archive to Canadian servers — even if the same agents also handle US conversations from a different deployment.

Can agents in one country handle conversations from multiple regions?

Yes. Data residency controls where data is stored, not which agents handle it. An agent on one team can simultaneously handle:

• Conversations from a US deployment (archived to US Cosmos)
• Conversations from a Canadian deployment (archived to Canada Cosmos)

The inbox shows all conversations assigned to the agent regardless of region. Only the archive destination differs.

How do I set a data region for a deployment or team?

Currently configured via SuperAdmin (Velaro internal).

For a deployment:

• SuperAdmin → POST /superadmin/sites/{siteId}/deployments/{deploymentId}/data-region
• Set dataRegion to us, ca, eu, or uk

For a team:

• SuperAdmin → POST /superadmin/sites/{siteId}/teams/{teamId}/data-region
• Set dataRegion to us, ca, eu, or uk

A self-service UI for admins to set this in the Teams & Deployments panels is on the roadmap.

Is this feature available on all plans?

Data residency is a subscription-gated feature (EnableDataResidency). Contact your Velaro account manager to enable it for your account.

What regulations does this support?

Important: Data residency for conversation transcripts is one layer of compliance. Full regulatory compliance for organizations in regulated industries also requires reviewing message data retention, access controls, breach notification procedures, and data processing agreements with Velaro. Consult your compliance officer and legal counsel for a full assessment.

What about historical conversations before data residency was enabled?

Conversations archived before data residency was configured will be in the US region (default). A SuperAdmin backfill tool is available to re-archive historical conversations to the correct regional Cosmos instance using a date range. Contact Velaro support to run a backfill for your account.

How is data residency documented for legal/audit purposes?

This document can be provided to auditors as a description of Velaro's data residency architecture. For a full data processing agreement (DPA) or security questionnaire response, contact compliance@velaro.com.

Technical summary for auditors:

• Transcript data archived to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB API in the designated Azure region
• Region assignment is immutable once set at conversation creation — cannot be changed after the fact
• Fallback to US only occurs when no region is configured at deployment or team level
• Staging and production use separate Cosmos accounts (velaro-transcripts and velaro-transcripts-prod)
• All Cosmos connections use TLS; data at rest encrypted by Azure (AES-256)