Where does raw data reside before it becomes usable?

Raw data typically lands in a landing zone within a data lake, such as an S3 bucket or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. This zone is often called the raw or bronze layer. The data is stored in its native format (CSV, JSON, Parquet) without transformations, and is versioned or timestamped. From there, it moves to a curated layer where it is cleaned, enriched, and transformed into a format suitable for analytics. The landing zone is designed for durability, scalability, and cost‑efficiency, and it serves as the single source of truth for all downstream processes.