I have had a few people ask me if the LACRM has data centres in the UK.
This latest question came from a Mortgage Broker, saying…
“The systems I use have to be uk based for data protection”
I assume they are governed by these guidelines and am wondering if the data centre location can be a way around that.
Does anyone have any insight, please?
I live in Canada and have a similar industry requirement, though ours is even more restrictive in that it says that all client documentation must be kept in Ontario. This rule was originally intended for hard copies (paper documents) but is now being interpreted, apparently, to include digital documentation. My argument is that it’s a ridiculous rule since every time you use Gmail or Outlook to send documents or discuss client information or Dropbox or Google Drive to store documents, you have no control over where the data is being stored. I maintain that even the emails we receive from our regulators are probably residing on AWS or some other servers outside the province. This doesn’t answer your question, I’m afraid, but it does make me feel better about using LACRM. In this day and age of cloud storage and large data centres located throughout North America, even if there were servers in Canada used by LACRM, there’s no way for me to direct that my documents are stored there. Please note that I am in no way counselling you to break your own industry rules. I’m just pointing out that the rules may be impossible to comply with.
While I’m not familiar with specific requirements for the location of data in the UK, we are GDPR compliant, and we have a number of security measures in place. That said, we don’t have any servers in the UK; I’m not sure if there’s really a way around that in terms of compliance.
Sorry I can’t be of more direct help here!
Thank you for the insight. I have encouraged the potential user who is enquiring to seek more specific information on the requirements they are being governed by.
And thanks Tony, you do raise some really strong and valid points. Most servers and data is most likely not held in the UK any way for a lot of companies, like you say especially using the cloud storage companies and email companies like Microsoft & Google etc.