Where your data lives, and why we will not overclaim it

The sentence we did not write

There is a sentence that almost wrote itself this week: all your data stays in New Zealand.

It is short, it sells, and every competitor says something like it. We are not going to use it, because it is not quite true, and the true version is better.

Here is what is actually the case.

Your data is held in New Zealand

Aiva runs on infrastructure in New Zealand. Your customer records, their conversations with Aiva, and your order history sit here, under New Zealand law. They are not shipped offshore to be processed, and they are not pooled with anyone else's.

That part is unambiguous, and it is the part that matters most for a New Zealand business answering questions from its own customers.

It is encrypted where it sits

The storage holding your data is encrypted at the volume level, with the keys held separately from the data itself. If the hardware walked out of the building, the disks would be unreadable.

This is a fairly recent improvement rather than something we have always had, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. It was worth doing properly.

Now the part most vendors skip

We keep off-site backups. Any provider that does not is one failure away from losing your business along with their own, so this is not optional.

Off-site means exactly that: a copy leaves the building. Our backup storage provider has no New Zealand region, so that copy sits outside the country.

So here is the honest shape of it. Your live data is in New Zealand. Backup copies are not.

What makes that acceptable is what happens before they leave.

The backups are encrypted so that we cannot read them either

The backups are encrypted before they go anywhere, using public-key encryption. The practical consequence is worth spelling out, because it is unusual and it is the strongest thing on this page:

The server that creates the backups cannot decrypt them. It holds only the key needed to lock them, not the one that opens them. Neither can the storage provider. Neither can anyone who compromises our infrastructure, including ransomware, which is a scenario where most backup arrangements quietly fail.

The key that opens those backups is held offline, by a named person, in New Zealand.

So a backup copy does sit on overseas storage, and it is ciphertext that only comes back to life in New Zealand, in the hands of one person.

We think that is a stronger claim than "all your data stays in New Zealand". It is also one we can put in front of a security reviewer without flinching.

Why we are being this specific

Because vague security claims are the ones that fall over.

At some point a customer of yours, or your own compliance team, is going to ask where the data goes. When that happens, "it all stays onshore" is the kind of answer that turns into an awkward correction six months later. We would rather hand you something accurate now that you can pass straight on.

It is the same standard we hold on the rest of our marketing. If we cannot show you where a number came from, we do not print it.

What we will not do with it

• We do not sell your data, or your customers' data.
• We do not use your customers' conversations to train models for other businesses.
• We do not mix one business's data with another's.
• We do not message your customers without a lawful basis, and an opt-out is honoured immediately and permanently, in software rather than by policy.

And where a human stays in the loop

Aiva answers enquiries on its own, day and night. That is the point of it.

What it does not do is make the consequential calls by itself. Anything touching money, anything that commits you to something, anything a vendor would want to read before it goes out: drafted, and put in front of you. You set where that line falls for your business.

An AI assistant that quietly did all of it unsupervised would demo better. It would also be the wrong product.

The detail we are deliberately not publishing

You will notice this article does not name our encryption tooling, our hosting layout, or how our keys are managed beyond the fact that they are held offline and off-site.

That is on purpose. A detailed public description of a security design is mostly useful to someone probing it. If your organisation runs a vendor security assessment, send it to us and we will answer it properly, in writing, to a named person.

Our security and data handling page sets out the full position, and the privacy policy covers your rights under the Privacy Act 2020.