This is a term that caused myself pause when I first started working in the technical space. Of course, in the art of architecture many words have deep meaning. On the surface, persists seems to be a synonym for 'stored', but there is a nuance. Technical workers often choose to use the word 'persists' to describe resilient, permanent storage of data. In other words, data that would exist beyond the execution of a program or the lifetime of a computer. Simply using 'stored' could imply transient in-memory storage, or other less robust storage methods.