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There is a trend developing amongst Australian companies. Those who went down the outsourcing route, are now reining back services and looking to cloud solutions to solve common business functions. With this trend, a number of questions arise around the storage of sensitive data outside Australian borders.
Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Australia, Greg Stone, says there is actually no legislation in place that requires businesses to store private information in Australia. This is a common misconception which is often quickly dissolved when legal advice is sought, rather than just assuming or following hearsay. One exception suggested was highly sensitive government information that may need to be stored locally for national security reasons.
Often concerns about the ability for foreign governments to force the turnover of data adds to the concern of data centres being located off-shore. In reality, the ability for international governments to request data is enabled through existing channels, wether the documents be stored in a filing cabinet, or on a server.
