ITSM SaaS data dilemmas – UK or abroad?

Is your SaaS Service Desk software hosted in the UK? Do you know exactly where your ITSM data is, at all times? Does this matter to you, your staff or your customers? Can your supplier transparently tell you where your data is stored and processed – in the UK or elsewhere? You may be surprised at the answers.

Sunrise has been in the IT service management and service desk business for a fair number of years now – 25 and counting – and we’ve heard the full range of answers to these questions. GDPR was high profile a couple of years ago but has found its place now, largely as another set of tick-boxes on the compliancy and risk assessment front. We’d love to think it’s as simple as that too, but we do know that under the skin there are some questions to be asked and answered when your company is dealing with other people’s data.

Where is the data stored and processed? That’s a big question for anyone involved with SaaS platforms; there’s a lot of responsibility to be considered, both personal and corporate. Most SaaS vendors will present you with a mind-numbing set of terms and conditions if you ask about data location – possibly because they don’t really know the answer. The truth is that data in the ‘cloud’ gets moved around a lot – but you can always ask and gain assurances as to its location. Detailed responses about EU Data Protection regulations and ‘Safe Harbor’ might not give you the straight answer you want, but instead assume that this is enough to ‘tick your box’.

Some customers do care, though. Public sector in the UK is not unknown to request that its data should be resident in the UK. Financial Services organisations too, and there are plenty more examples of business concerned about knowing where their data is.

Our take? Sunrise is a UK Headquartered company with largely UK domiciled customers using our Service Management platform. Our SaaS ITSM platform sits on the IBM Cloud and is stored in the IBM data centre near our offices in Chessington, UK. Disaster Recovery is in the UK as well. If having UK data is important to you too, ask other ITSM tools vendors where their data is stored and then get in touch with us. Ask us a question and we’ll always try to give you a straight answer.