Cloud hosting that keeps your data in Zambia
Most cloud services used in Zambia store their data in South Africa, Europe or the United States. If your customers, regulator or contracts expect data to stay in the country, that is a problem you inherit the day you sign up. SwiftCloud is built so it is not a problem at all: the region is in Lusaka, and what you put there stays there.
One region, in Lusaka
Everything you create in zm-lusaka-central-1 runs on servers physically located in Lusaka, Zambia. There is no silent replication to a data centre in another country.
Backups stay in the region
Managed database backups and point-in-time recovery archives are written to object storage in the same Zambian region as the database they protect.
Your keys, your buckets
Object storage buckets are isolated per organisation with their own access keys. Data moves out of Zambia only if you choose to send it somewhere.
A Zambian counterparty
You contract with a company operating in Zambia, are invoiced in Kwacha, and can pay by mobile money. No foreign-currency card, no offshore billing entity.
Who this matters for
- Banks, microfinance and insurers supervised by the Bank of Zambia or the Pensions and Insurance Authority, whose customer records are expected to be held and auditable in Zambia.
- Government suppliers and parastatals whose tenders specify local hosting for citizen data.
- Health, education and telecoms providers holding personal data at scale under the Data Protection Act.
- Startups selling to any of the above, who need to answer "where is our data?" with one word in a procurement questionnaire.
Frequently asked
- Does Zambian law require data to be kept in Zambia?
- Zambia's Data Protection Act (No. 3 of 2021) regulates the processing of personal data and places conditions on transferring it outside Zambia, and sector regulators such as the Bank of Zambia set their own requirements for the institutions they supervise. Whether a given dataset must stay in-country depends on what it is and who you are; take advice from your own counsel or compliance team. Hosting in Zambia removes the question for the data you keep here.
- Where exactly is my data stored?
- In the zm-lusaka-central-1 region in Lusaka, Zambia, on storage replicated across multiple servers within that region for durability. It is not copied to any other country.
- Can I prove residency to an auditor or a client?
- Yes. Every resource shows its region in the console, and the region is stated in your invoices. Contact us for a written statement of hosting location for a specific organisation.
- What about latency for users in Zambia?
- Traffic from Lusaka to a workload in the Lusaka region stays on Zambian networks rather than crossing to Johannesburg, Europe or the US and back, which is what most foreign-hosted sites serving Zambia do today.
- Can I still use tools built for AWS?
- Object storage is S3-compatible, so the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone and any S3 SDK work by changing the endpoint and credentials. Managed PostgreSQL and MariaDB are standard engines with standard drivers.
This page describes how SwiftCloud hosts data. It is not legal advice; for your own obligations under Zambian law, consult your counsel or compliance team.