EU data residency is generally available
Every conversation, every model call, every Trace and every backup for EU workspaces now stays in the EU. Dublin is primary, Frankfurt is failover, and your contract is with Pazau Ireland under Irish law.
Starting today, EU data residency is generally available for every Pazau Enterprise workspace. If you choose the EU region, your customer conversations are processed and stored in the European Union. That covers the inbox, AI inference, Traces, analytics, backups, and the people who can access your data for support.
We ran this as a limited availability program for eleven months with 38 customers. We used that time to find every place data could leave the region, then close each one. This post explains what "EU residency" means at Pazau and what it doesn't, and how to move an existing workspace.
What "residency" has to mean
Many vendors say they have EU hosting when they mean the primary database sits in Frankfurt. The conversation text still goes to a model endpoint in Virginia. Logs ship to a US observability vendor. A support engineer in another time zone can open your tickets with one click.
That isn't residency. It's a database location.
When we started, we wrote one rule and held every system to it:
If a byte of customer content, or anything derived from it, is processed or stored, it is processed or stored in the EU. No exceptions for "temporary", "metadata" or "just logs".
"Derived from it" is the hard part. Embeddings are derived data. So are QA scores, topic clusters, CSAT predictions, and the reasoning steps inside a Trace. All of them stay in the region.
The architecture
EU workspaces run in a fully separate deployment of the Pazau platform. It is a separate stack, not a tenant flag on a shared one.
- Primary region: Dublin (eu-west-1). All application services, the conversation store, the Traces store, search indexes, and the analytics warehouse.
- Failover region: Frankfurt (eu-central-1). Continuous replication with a recovery point objective of 5 minutes and a recovery time objective of 1 hour. We run a full regional failover drill every quarter. The last one, on January 21, completed in 38 minutes.
- Inference: EU model endpoints only. Every model call from an EU workspace goes to a model provider endpoint hosted in the EU. That includes Pazau Agent reasoning, Voice transcription, Insights scoring and PII redaction. Every provider operates under zero data retention, and nothing is used for training. If an EU endpoint is degraded, we don't fail over to a US endpoint. Pazau Agent hands conversations to your human team, and that is the only fallback.
- Voice media. Call audio terminates at EU edge points of presence in Dublin and Frankfurt, and recordings are stored in Dublin.
- Backups. Encrypted with region-scoped keys, stored in Dublin and replicated to Frankfurt. They are never copied outside the EU.
What stays in the EU
| Data | EU workspace location | Leaves the EU? |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation content (all channels) | Dublin, replicated to Frankfurt | No |
| Attachments and call recordings | Dublin | No |
| Model inputs and outputs | EU model endpoints, zero retention | No |
| Traces (reasoning, actions, approvals) | Dublin | No |
| Embeddings and search indexes | Dublin | No |
| Insights scores, topics, CSAT predictions | Dublin | No |
| Application logs containing content | Dublin, 30-day retention | No |
| Backups | Dublin and Frankfurt | No |
| Billing records (account name, seat counts, usage totals) | US | Yes, contains no customer content |
| Service health metrics (latency, error rates) | US | Yes, contains no customer content |
The last two rows are the only data that crosses the Atlantic. We built a content-free telemetry pipeline so our global on-call team can see that Dublin is healthy without seeing any conversations. A schema check at the regional boundary drops any event carrying a free-text field before it leaves.
Who can access your data
Support access is part of residency. An EU region doesn't mean much if anyone at the company can read it.
For EU workspaces:
- Support and engineering access is limited to EU-based staff employed by Pazau Ireland Limited. Today that is 31 people in Dublin and London.
- Every access is just-in-time. An engineer requests access to a specific workspace for a specific ticket. The request is time-boxed to 4 hours by default and logged in your workspace audit log.
- You can require customer approval. When customer approval is on, nobody at Pazau can open your data until an admin on your side approves the request.
- Break-glass access for a production incident requires two approvers and pages me and our CISO, Omar Haddad.
The contract matches the architecture
EU workspaces are contracted with Pazau Ireland Limited, 14 Hanover Quay, Dublin 2, under the laws of Ireland. Your Data Processing Addendum names the EU region as a binding commitment, not a best-efforts statement.
Core processing never leaves the EU, so Standard Contractual Clauses aren't needed for it. SCCs still cover the narrow cases where they apply, such as the content-free billing data above, and are already in the DPA.
Our sub-processor list now has a region column. For an EU workspace, every sub-processor that touches customer content is marked EU-only. As always, we give 30 days' notice before adding a sub-processor, and you can object.
Vasa Mobility: 11 languages, one region
Vasa Mobility runs e-scooters and e-bikes in 40 European cities. It was the first customer in the limited availability program. Its riders contact support about parking fines, damaged vehicles, billing disputes and account verification, often with photos of ID documents and location history attached. Residency was a hard requirement for Vasa.
It moved to the EU region in March 2025. Today Pazau Agent resolves 73% of its conversations end-to-end, in 11 languages, 24 hours a day.
"Our DPO's first question about any AI vendor is where the model runs. With Pazau, we could answer with a map and a contract clause instead of a paragraph of caveats. That's what got us live in six weeks instead of six months."
— Linnea Holmberg, VP Customer Experience, Vasa Mobility
You can read the full story at /customers/vasa-mobility.
What we learned during limited availability
A few things surprised us.
Latency went down. Most EU customers' end users are in Europe. Serving them from Dublin instead of Virginia cut median time to first response from 2.3 seconds to 1.7 seconds for EU chat traffic. Voice gained even more, because every hop counts in a latency budget.
Model parity was the long pole. Model providers don't launch every model in every region on the same day. We now treat EU availability as a release gate: a model version doesn't ship to anyone until it's available on EU endpoints under the same terms. This slows some launches by a few weeks, and we think that's the right trade.
Third-party Actions need their own review. When Pazau Agent calls your Shopify store or your claims system, that data goes wherever that system lives, and residency can't control it. We added a region hint to every Action definition. If an Action points to an endpoint outside the EU, the workspace admin sees a warning at configuration time and the Trace records it.
Some features had to be rebuilt, not just redeployed. Cross-workspace benchmarking, for example, compared anonymized aggregates across all customers. For EU workspaces, benchmarking aggregates are now computed inside the EU region, and only the final anonymized statistics leave it. Benchmarking is opt-in and stays off unless you turn it on.
Moving an existing workspace
If you're an existing Enterprise customer in the US region, migration is a managed project, not a checkbox.
Week 0 Contract amendment (novation to Pazau Ireland Limited, EU region rider)
Week 1 EU workspace provisioned; SSO, SCIM and Actions config copied
Week 1–2 Historical data copied to Dublin, checksums verified per object
Week 2 Dual-run: new conversations mirrored for validation
Week 3 Cutover in a maintenance window you choose (typically < 15 min)
Week 3+ US copy deleted within 30 days, deletion certificate issued
For a typical workspace with 2 to 3 years of history, the full migration takes about three weeks. The cutover window during that time has been under 15 minutes in every migration so far.
Availability
EU data residency is available today on the Enterprise plan, with no change to per-resolution pricing. Pazau Agent, Inbox, Voice and Insights are all supported, with full feature parity. The one exception is the Voice outbound dialer in 4 countries, which ships in Q2.
To learn more, visit the Trust Center or ask your account team for the EU region architecture whitepaper. It covers the network diagrams, key management and data flow for every service in more detail than this post.
Residency is one part of a broader commitment. We never train foundation models on your data, we redact PII before inference, and we log every AI decision in a Trace you can export. With this release, all of that happens in the EU for EU customers.