Data residency / compliance guide

“AI Data” Is on Atlassian's Own List of What Can't Be Pinned to a Region

Atlassian's own support documentation publishes an in-scope / out-of-scope table for data residency, product by product. “AI data” is in the out-of-scope column — for every app, on every plan that offers residency at all. Here's exactly what that means, and what it doesn't.

Three separate questions, which partner pages usually run together: where does the data rest, where is it processed, and whose law reaches the vendor.

AI data

Every app, per Atlassian

Can't be pinned to a region

Per app

Not per project, client, or user

Residency set at this level

Up to 24 hrs

Depending on data size

Downtime for a region move

Up to 3 days

Per Atlassian's own page

Search disabled during re-index

1. Where Does the Data Rest?

Atlassian offers data residency for in-scope app data, and it is not an Enterprise-only feature. Atlassian's update on its public tracker ticket CLOUD-11100 says availability of data residency “has been rolled out to all Atlassian paid customers” “for the products in scope” (update of 7 February 2022, closed as Fixed). Getting that right matters: several write-ups still describe it as an Enterprise feature. The scope table below is the part with the limits. Residency also describes storage only, which leads to the next question.

What's In Scope, and What Isn't

Atlassian's Understand data residency page opens with a clear promise: “Data residency gives you control over where your in-scope app data for Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, Confluence, and Loom is hosted.” The page then publishes an in-scope / out-of-scope table per product — and the out-of-scope column is where the useful reading is.

App	Data that can't be pinned to a region
All Atlassian apps	App analytics, AI data, Cached content, Transient data, User account information, Third-party integration data
Jira	AI data, Connected DevOps data (commits, branches, pull requests, builds, deployments, feature flags, remote links)
Confluence	AI data

“AI data” appears in all three rows above — under All Atlassian apps, and again, separately, under both Jira and Confluence. This isn't a scope note that was missed once; it's repeated. The page also states residency “can't be set at the individual project, client, or user level within the app,” and quantifies the cost of moving regions: downtime that “may last up to 24 hours, depending on data size,” with search “temporarily disabled during re-indexing, which can take up to 3 days.”

Beyond AI Data: What Else Residency Doesn't Reach

The AI-data gap above isn't the only exclusion in Atlassian's own documentation — it's just the one that pairs with the training-opt-out story. Read the rest of the same support page as a checklist and the residency control turns out to be narrower than most vendor-neutral explainers suggest:

Residency is off by default

Unless an admin pins a location, apps are hosted in the Global location, which distributes data dynamically across AWS regions. Residency isn't a property of the plan you bought — it's a setting someone has to remember to turn on.

User account information is out of scope entirely

Atlassian's own words: “User account information data is considered out-of-scope for data residency.” Your identity directory doesn't move with the rest of the instance, whatever region you pick.

Marketplace apps have to be moved separately

“Some Marketplace apps will have to be moved separately after the Atlassian app has moved.” Pinning Jira or Confluence to a region says nothing about where an installed app's own data lives.

Backup data has only been in scope since 28 April 2026

Backups taken before that date don't move when an app is pinned to a region later — a residency setting applied today doesn't retroactively relocate everything already backed up.

Existing Loom workspaces can't be migrated to a region

“Only a new Loom site can have data residency assigned during the provisioning step. All existing Loom workspaces cannot be migrated.”

Existing Talent and Focus data can't be migrated either

“Existing Talent and Focus data cannot be migrated to a different data region.” Same limit, different products.

Choosing Switzerland costs you features

Analytics, Opsgenie reports, and Assets dashboards are unavailable there. A residency choice made for compliance reasons can quietly remove functionality elsewhere in the product.

The mechanism behind the app exclusion, in plain terms: some Marketplace apps run on servers the app vendor operates, outside Atlassian's own infrastructure. Atlassian's residency setting has no reach into a system it doesn't run — the “Runs on Atlassian” badge in the Marketplace listing is the filter for whether an app is even a candidate for residency at all.

2. Where Is It Processed?

A residency setting says where in-scope data is stored. Two Atlassian pages say, in Atlassian's own words, that other handling falls outside it:

Rovo code context, auto-enabled for paid Bitbucket workspaces

“Indexed code and embeddings are stored and processed in the United States.” And: “Data residency configuration isn't currently supported for code context.” When a paid Bitbucket workspace is connected to a Jira site with Rovo enabled, “Atlassian will automatically enable Code context and create a semantic search index of that workspace.” Set up code context for your site, Atlassian Support

Forge customer-managed remotes

“Customer-managed remotes are not eligible for data residency.” Customer-managed egress and remotes are also not currently supported for Atlassian Government Cloud, and once enabled in production the setting “cannot be disabled or removed in a later version.” Atlassian's page was last updated on 12 October 2026. Customer-managed egress and remotes, Atlassian Developer

Same caution as below: “not covered by residency” is not the same as a statement about every place a given feature sends data. These are the two cases where Atlassian has said so itself.

3. Whose Law Reaches the Vendor?

This is a different question from the first two. Where data sits and which jurisdictions can compel the company operating the service are separate matters. The US CLOUD Act is the statute people most often raise in this context. Atlassian's own Isolated Cloud FAQ draws the line itself: data sovereignty “can have implications for how data must be handled beyond where it is stored.” GForge is also a US-incorporated company, so this question applies to any vendor you evaluate, including us.

We are not a law firm and do not answer it here. Whether a given arrangement meets a given obligation is a question for your own counsel. For what Atlassian's Isolated Cloud does and does not offer on this point, see what Isolated Cloud includes and doesn't.

Two Facts That Are Only Interesting Together

On its own, an out-of-scope table entry is a documentation detail. It stops being one next to a second fact: Atlassian began using Jira and Confluence data to train AI by default on August 17, 2026. The customer who bought data residency to keep Confluence in Germany did not buy residency for the AI data that same instance now contributes by default. Two Atlassian pages, read side by side, say that plainly — neither says it about the other.

Be precise about what this claim is and isn't. “Out of scope for residency” means Atlassian does not commit to pinning that data to a region. It is not a statement about which country processes it — Atlassian's page names no destination, and none should be inferred. The gap is the absence of a commitment, not evidence of a specific one.

What Residency Actually Does Cover

Residency is a real control, and it covers the part of your instance most buyers actually care about: the Confluence pages and Jira work items themselves — the in-scope app data the support page describes up front. A compliance buyer who has already read this far will check that claim and discount the whole page if it isn't here. The argument in this page is about the gap at the edge — the AI layer — not a claim that residency does nothing.

For Some Buyers, There's No Cloud Column to Compare Against

Everything above assumes a region choice inside commercial Atlassian Cloud. For a narrower set of buyers, that choice doesn't exist yet at all. Packaged Agile, a federal-focused Atlassian solution partner, published an assessment on 20 March 2026 of what Data Center end-of-life means for government customers: Government Cloud reached FedRAMP Moderate in March 2025, but no FedRAMP High and no DoD Impact Level 5 authorization exists, and Atlassian has said only that it is “working on building the FedRAMP High and Impact Level 5 environments to submit for authorization prior to the end of life for Data Center products,” with no date published. The partner estimates late 2027 at the earliest — against Data Center's own March 2028 and March 2029 deadlines. The same assessment notes Jira Align has no compliant path into Government Cloud at all, and that classified networks and SCIFs have no cloud option whatsoever.

For a FedRAMP High, IL5, or air-gapped requirement, this isn't a preference to be argued with — it's a procurement gate. Verify current FedRAMP status directly before relying on this; it's the one fact on this page that can change without warning.

What an Admin Hasn't Priced

Two operational facts sit in the same support page, easy to skip past on the way to the scope table:

Residency is per app, not per project

Atlassian's page states residency “can't be set at the individual project, client, or user level within the app.” One region setting applies to the whole Jira or Confluence instance — there's no per-project carve-out for the one team that needs different handling.

Moving regions isn't free

A region change costs downtime that “may last up to 24 hours, depending on data size,” and search is “temporarily disabled during re-indexing, which can take up to 3 days.” Getting the region wrong the first time isn't a settings tweak — it's a scheduled outage.

Where Data Residency Came From

Data residency wasn't always available to every paying customer — it was Enterprise-gated until customers voted it open on Atlassian's own public tracker. The request is now closed as Fixed; Atlassian confirmed on the ticket that “as of late January 2022 availability of Data Residency has been rolled out to all Atlassian paid customers for the products in scope.” The AI-data gap covered above is a limit on what a customer-won feature actually reaches — not a feature Atlassian never intended to ship broadly.

This is documentation Atlassian revises without announcement — the out-of-scope table above is exactly the kind of thing that gets edited quietly. Re-verify directly against the support page before citing it in a compliance review.

Self-Managed Doesn't Have an Out-of-Scope Column

When your data never leaves your own infrastructure, there's no separate AI-data carve-out to check for — there's just where you put it. See what that looks like against your actual footprint.

Size My Instance

Sources

Last verified: September 2026. Drawn from Atlassian's own support documentation and public issue tracker. Atlassian revises this documentation without announcement — re-verify quarterly, and before citing it in a compliance review, at support.atlassian.com .