Where is my data stored, and where is it processed?
Clinical records are stored in Sydney on AU Sovereign and Global, and in London on the UK Sovereign region; processing location depends on the profile.
These are two separate questions with two different answers.
Stored: on the AU Sovereign and Global profiles, your clinical record is stored in Akoua’s Australian cloud in Sydney (ap-southeast-2), on Amazon Web Services. The UK Sovereign region stores its records in the United Kingdom instead — see below.
Processed: where audio and transcripts are processed depends on the sovereignty profile your organisation chose at sign-up.
Keep the two apart when you’re answering a patient or a medico-legal reviewer. Storage residency in Sydney does not by itself tell you where processing happened.
Storage: Sydney, on the AU Sovereign and Global profiles
Your clinical record sits on Australian infrastructure — Sydney, ap-southeast-2 — handled in line with the Australian Privacy Principles (Privacy Act 1988 Cth). Where the processing happens is a separate question, answered by your profile below. That holds on AU Sovereign and on Global alike.
Everything is encrypted: AES-256-GCM application-level at rest, covering transcripts, notes, PII and voiceprints, and TLS 1.2/1.3 in transit. Sign-in is passkey-first, and every access to a record is written to an append-only audit log. Akoua doesn’t yet hold formal certifications — they’re on the roadmap, and we’d rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.
Processing: set by your profile
On AU Sovereign, everything stays in Australia: transcription and note drafting run on vetted Australian services over private links inside Akoua’s cloud — disclosed on every note, under the consent your organisation gives for that processing. Ordinary consent to record is a separate authority, given for each consultation. Note drafting runs on an Australian route that spans Sydney and Melbourne, so a consult may be structured in a different state from the one you practise in; the sub-processor list sets out each provider and where it processes. Speaker identity, including any voice profile, is matched only on Akoua’s own infrastructure and never sent to a provider. Nothing is processed outside Australia without a separate, explicit request for that specific session.
New Zealand organisations run AU Sovereign, so the paragraph above is their answer too: processing in Australia, record in Sydney — across the Tasman, and nowhere further without explicit acceptance for that session.
On Global, audio and transcripts are processed by vetted global providers under your organisation’s consent. Neither Akoua nor those providers use your data to train models. The record still lands in Sydney; the processing did not happen there.
The profiles are set out in full in the sovereignty profiles.
UK Sovereign is live for United Kingdom organisations: it stores the clinical record in the United Kingdom (London), and transcription and note drafting run in the European Union for every consult — transcription on Deepgram’s EU regional service, note drafting on Amazon Bedrock, invoked from AWS London and served in AWS’s EU regions — under the UK’s adequacy regulations for the EEA. United Kingdom organisations sign up at uk.akoua.ai — Akoua in the UK has the detail.
Support tickets stay in Akoua
When you raise a support ticket, it is handled inside Akoua’s own platform — there is no third-party helpdesk service holding your correspondence. On the AU Sovereign and Global profiles, tickets are stored encrypted in the same Australian cloud as the rest of your organisation’s records, scoped to your organisation, and every access to clinical content is written to the audit log.
That is also why the ticket itself should stay operational: describe what happened rather than pasting clinical content into it. Support staff who need to look at a record do so through a separate, audited path that records who looked, when, and why.
The website and billing are separate
Records from the akoua.ai website — the updates list and the contact form — are stored using Cloudflare Workers KV, a globally replicated store, so they may be held outside Australia. Contact-form enquiries are also delivered to our inbox through Amazon SES and may be processed outside Australia in transit. These website records are entirely separate from service data. Billing is handled by Apple, Google or Stripe on their own infrastructure.
Audio is a shorter story than either: it’s kept only while you review, then deleted. See what happens to consult audio, or the privacy notice for your region.
Still stuck?
Email support@akoua.ai — or see the contact page. Service status lives at status.akoua.ai.