Does Kentico Work in China? Offshore Azure Hosting, Data Residency & ICP
Xperience by Kentico is a DXP whose hosted SaaS runs on Microsoft Azure in twenty regions — none inside mainland China — so your site's content and the visitor data its marketing layer collects sit offshore under PIPL, and the public mainland site it powers still needs an ICP filing. A compliance-first look at data residency and the two doors.
Does Kentico (Xperience by Kentico) work in China?
Whether you can use Kentico in mainland China is first a data-residency and licensing question, not a speed one. Xperience by Kentico is a digital experience platform — it runs your website, its administration and a marketing layer that collects visitor data — and in its hosted SaaS form Kentico runs the whole thing on Microsoft Azure. Where it keeps your content and your visitors' data is what China's law responds to.
In Kentico's own SaaS documentation the platform “supports the following Azure regions” — and the twenty it names, from East US to UAE North, include none in mainland China; the nearest, East Asia and Southeast Asia, are still outside it. “All customer data is stored within the customer's designated single tenant account in the region they specified,” so your content and the contact and activity data the DXP's marketing layer gathers from China visitors live in an offshore region — a cross-border transfer of personal information PIPL governs. And because Xperience is the platform the public site runs on, the ICP filing attaches to that mainland site, which the SaaS gives no mainland footing. The table below is Kentico's own wording and the rule each line triggers.
This is a risk picture, not a verdict — what applies turns on what personal data you collect, how much of it there is, and who your users are. Our China team can map your Kentico exposure with you →
What Kentico's own documentation says about China
| Fact | Primary source |
|---|---|
| Xperience by Kentico's hosted SaaS runs on Microsoft Azure, in regions that are all offshore. Kentico's own SaaS documentation states the platform “leverages Azure components, selected third-party services, and our own management and automation capabilities,” and that it “supports the following Azure regions”: East US, East US 2, West US, West US 2, North Central US, Canada Central, Canada East, West Europe, North Europe, Germany West Central, Switzerland North, UK South, UK West, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan East, Japan West, Australia East, Australia Southeast and UAE North. None is in mainland China — the nearest, East Asia and Southeast Asia, are still outside it — so the DXP that runs your site is hosted offshore wherever you provision it. | Kentico — SaaS overview (docs.kentico.com), retrieved 2026-10-07 |
| Your content and data are stored in the offshore region you select. Kentico states that “All customer data is stored within the customer's designated single tenant account in the region they specified prior to service provisioning.” Because every region on its list is offshore, there is no in-product way to keep your China content or your visitors' data on the mainland. Kentico also notes that Xperience Portal metadata — “username/email … and project name” — and its Auth0 multi-factor-authentication data are stored in its European data center. | Kentico — SaaS overview (docs.kentico.com), retrieved 2026-10-07 |
| As a DXP, Kentico collects your visitors' personal data — and PIPL governs sending it offshore. Xperience by Kentico is not only a content store: its digital-marketing layer — contact management, forms, personalization and activity tracking — builds profiles from the people who use your site. Gathered from people in China and held in an offshore Kentico region, that is a cross-border transfer of personal information under PIPL: the handler — you, Kentico's customer, not Kentico — must give notice, obtain separate consent, and satisfy one transfer mechanism (a CAC security assessment, the CAC standard contract, or certification). | PIPL Chapter III, Articles 38–43 |
| For some handlers, that data is not allowed to leave the mainland at all. For a critical information infrastructure operator or a large-volume handler, personal information collected in China must be stored in the mainland (PIPL Article 40; Cybersecurity Law Article 39 (formerly Article 37)). Because Kentico's SaaS publishes no mainland-China region, meeting that duty means running the storage on infrastructure inside the mainland — a separate arrangement from your Kentico tenant, not a region setting. | PIPL Article 40; Cybersecurity Law Article 39 (formerly Article 37) |
| The ICP filing attaches to the public site Kentico powers, not to the product. Xperience by Kentico is the platform your public site runs on — serving the pages itself or feeding a headless frontend — so the ICP filing (State Council Order No. 292; MIIT Order No. 33) attaches to that mainland site and the in-country host it runs on. With no mainland region on its SaaS list, Kentico gives that site no footing to file against. | Kentico — SaaS overview (docs.kentico.com), retrieved 2026-10-07; State Council Order No. 292; MIIT Order No. 33 |
Sources verified by the 21YunBox compliance team on 2026-10-07.
For a mainland-China audience, the deciding question about Kentico is not how fast a page paints — it is where the platform that runs your site keeps your content and your visitors’ data, and whether the public site it powers can be licensed to operate. Xperience by Kentico is a digital experience platform: it runs your website, its administration and a marketing layer that collects visitor data, and in its hosted SaaS form Kentico runs the whole thing on Microsoft Azure — in regions it names itself, none inside mainland China. A China-facing site on Kentico is reachable, but it is served from offshore, the data it gathers lands offshore, and the public site still needs an ICP filing Kentico’s SaaS cannot anchor. The reachability is real; the residency and the licensing are the exposure.
Kentico in China at a glance
| What decides it | In Kentico's own terms |
|---|---|
| Where it runs | Xperience by Kentico SaaS “leverages Azure components” and runs in one of twenty Azure regions you choose — East US through UAE North. None is in mainland China; the nearest, East Asia and Southeast Asia, are offshore. |
| Where your data lives | “All customer data is stored within the customer's designated single tenant account in the region they specified.” Every region on the list is offshore, and Xperience Portal metadata and Auth0 MFA data are kept in Europe. |
| What it collects | As a DXP, Xperience runs your site and a marketing layer — contact management, forms, personalization and activity tracking — that gathers visitor personal data. From China users, held offshore, that is a cross-border transfer PIPL governs. |
| Serving the public | The public mainland site Xperience powers needs an ICP filing tied to an in-country host. The SaaS lists no mainland region, so it offers no footing to file against. |
| Is it reachable? | Yes — the DXP is not blocked. The exposure is that offshore hosting, data residency and the ICP filing are compliance facts, and network tuning does not change them. |
A DXP on offshore Azure — twenty regions, none in the mainland
Xperience by Kentico is not a copy of your content sitting behind an API; it is the platform your website runs on. In its hosted SaaS form, Kentico operates that platform on Microsoft Azure: in its own documentation the service “leverages Azure components, selected third-party services, and our own management and automation capabilities,” and it “supports the following Azure regions” — twenty of them, from East US to UAE North. Not one is inside mainland China, and the closest — East Asia and Southeast Asia — are still outside it. Kentico also states that “All customer data is stored within the customer’s designated single tenant account in the region they specified prior to service provisioning,” with Xperience Portal metadata and its Auth0 multi-factor-authentication records kept in a European data center. So wherever you provision, the DXP that serves your site, and the data it holds, live offshore.
Self-hosting changes who runs the servers, not the question. Xperience by Kentico can also be deployed on your own infrastructure or a private cloud rather than the SaaS — but then residency turns on where you host it, and unless that is a hosting resource inside the mainland, a China-facing Xperience site is still served from offshore. Either way, the geography settles the compliance starting point before performance ever enters it.
The marketing layer puts your China visitors’ data offshore
A digital experience platform earns its name by collecting data. Xperience’s digital-marketing features — contact management, forms, personalization and activity tracking — build profiles from the people who use your site, which is exactly the point of running a DXP rather than a static brochure. Gathered from people in China and written to the offshore region you chose, that visitor data is a cross-border transfer of personal information under China’s Personal Information Protection Law: the handler — you, Kentico’s customer, not Kentico — has to give notice, obtain separate consent, and clear one transfer mechanism (a CAC security assessment, the CAC standard contract, or certification).
For some handlers the data cannot leave at all. If you are a critical information infrastructure operator or a large-volume handler, personal information collected in China must be stored in the mainland (PIPL Article 40; Cybersecurity Law Article 39 (formerly Article 37)) — a residency duty an offshore-only region list cannot satisfy. Keeping that slice of data on Chinese soil means running its storage on infrastructure inside the mainland, separate from your Kentico SaaS tenant. Caching assets closer to the visitor does not move the store, and it does not make an offshore store lawful.
Who gets ICP-filed — the site Kentico powers
Because Xperience is the platform the public site runs on — whether it serves the pages itself or feeds a headless frontend — the licensing question lands squarely on that site. A public-facing website delivered to mainland visitors from inside China turns on an ICP filing (ICP 备案) under State Council Order No. 292 and MIIT Order No. 33, and that filing must attach to a hosting resource physically located in the mainland. Kentico’s SaaS lists no mainland region, so there is nothing on it to file against.
That is where “we already run on Kentico” runs out: serving mainland visitors from an offshore Azure region is not the same as being licensed to operate there, and tuning the stack does not create the mainland footing a filing needs.
This is a risk read, not a ruling: whether an ICP filing, in-country storage for the personal data you collect, or both apply to you depends on what you publish, how much personal information you handle, and who your users are — settle it with counsel before you build.
Where 21YunBox fits — a compliant overlay, not a migration
You keep building on Kentico, and your Xperience project, channels and region settings stay exactly as they are. We supply the one piece a DXP with no mainland presence leaves to you: compliant, ICP-filed delivery from inside the mainland, set in front of the site you already run — no rebuild, no second codebase, and no move off Kentico. Our China team weighs your ICP and PIPL data-residency obligations against your entity and the visitor data your marketing layer collects, then stands up the in-country delivery — and, where the law demands it, the in-country storage — a lawful China presence requires, while your Kentico platform stays where it already runs.
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