OneWorld Data In Germany

Hi List

We are a company with our head office in New Zealand but have several branches in Europe including the UK, Belgium and Germany. We connect our UK and Belgium offices into our OneWorld system in NZ via Citrix. We are wanting to connect our German office as well, but have been advised by one of the big 5 companies that we will be breaking German law because the data needs to be stored in Germany. I believe that other companies who have offices in Germany but store their data in another country must have come up against this and I would be very interested to hear from anybody who has been through this before us. Thanks in advance.

Marty

Marty,

I qualify this first by saying that I am not German nor am I versed in German law. I am aware of the German Data Protection Act. This act covers the housing, retention and transport of personal data. Similar acts have been created in many EU member states. I was not aware that it would cover the types of data that OneWorld would normally deal with in a multi-national corporation.

Take a look at these links in English:

www.bfd.bund.de/information/bdsg_eng.pdf
www.datenschutz-berlin.de/gesetze/bdsg/bdsgeng.htm

I have a number of clients with German subsidiaries who access OneWorld remotely. In two cases the data centre is in the UK and in another in the U.S. I do not believe any issues were found with the German subsidiary accessing its data housed in the U.S. Perhaps if the Address Book records for Employees contain personal information or if there is personal information recorded against A/R transactions then this act might apply. However in any case I do not believe it would be "illegal". I believe this is just a case where you must assure that you abide by the acts provisions when handling and storing the data.

Regards,

Thanks for this Justin. Looks like I've got some reading to do!

Regards

Marty Fleming
Business Analyst
Richmond Limited

Phone: +64 +6 8786464 Ext 8168
Fax : +64 +6 8780959
Mobile: +64 +21 478946
Email: mailto:[email protected]

OneWorld: Xe SP16.1
Database: Oracle 8.1.6.3
Enterprise Server: Compaq Proliant 8500R W2K





OneWorld: Xe SP16.1
Database: Oracle 8i
Enterprise Server: Compaq Proliant 8500R W2K

Hello Marty,

we investigated this recently for the same reasons, our conclusion was that as long as the data is kept within your company (thus can be centralized in NZ) you are not breaking any laws.

Kind regards,

André Jille

Deloitte & Touche

Hello Marty,

we investigated this recently for the same reasons, our conclusion was that as long as the data is kept within your company (thus can be centralized in NZ) you are not breaking any laws.

Kind regards,

André Jille

Deloitte & Touche

Thanks Andre

I think we had come to pretty much the same conclusion. The issue seems to
be that the German authorities must be able to be access the data if need
be. Our German office is very small (2 persons) and what we were hoping to
do is to have all the inputting of debtors and creditors by our accountant
in the Belgium office and do the accounts from there. I suspect that we
would need to provide access to the system from the German office so that if
german tax autorities wanted to carry out a spot audit, then they would have
immediate access to the data. Does this sound reasonable?

Regards

Marty Fleming
Business Analyst
Richmond Limited

Phone: +64 +6 8786464 Ext 8168
Fax : +64 +6 8780959
Mobile: +64 +21 478946
Email: mailto:[email protected]

OneWorld: Xe SP16.1
Database: Oracle 8.1.6.3
Enterprise Server: Compaq Proliant 8500R W2K





OneWorld: Xe SP16.1
Database: Oracle 8i
Enterprise Server: Compaq Proliant 8500R W2K