Slack's launching a new data residency in the UK. The programme will let organisations choose which country or region its data gets stored in. The announcement of the new service follows the launch of other data residency programmes introduced outside the U.S., including Germany, France, Australia, and Japan for Slack Plus and Enterprise Grid customers
In a statement, Slack said to support over 12 million collaborators using the tool, the company wanted to extend options as to where enterprises could store sensitive data, adding: "For the most part, data were primarily stored in the U.S., posing a challenge for some companies overseas that wanted to host data closer to home."
Addressing the issue of markets that have more stringent regulations, Slack told me, this is why it launched the service in the first place, targeting industries such as financial services, the public sector, and healthcare. As of now, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, and Tokyo, have data centers. The U.S. and Canada will soon be available, I'm told.
"Slack helps customers meet specific industry regulations or international security and data privacy standards, including FINRA, HIPAA, FedRAMP, and GDPR"
Because of the risk involved in housing such critical data points, Slack said it certifies its service with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, EU-US Privacy Shield, Swiss-US Privacy Shield, and Cloud Security Alliance to ensure high levels of protection. Slack stores user-generated data, which includes messages, posts, files, as well as searches in its data centers, data Slack said it encrypts.
According to the company, app-generated Slack messages and files are stored in the same region as user-generated messages. "The location of data from the third-party apps teams use with Slack is dependent on the application partner's policies." Existing Slack customers can move data to new regions, but the entire organisation must make the move, I'm told.
