Your Privacy, Not Sharing Is Caring
Our Canadian business and enterprise customers often ask us: what does “Data Centre” in Canada mean? This sounds like a simple question, but actually it isn’t. Let’s dive into what data location means to you.
Privacy is the main driving force for using data centres with a determined location. For financial and medical records, for example, we would like governmental or legal protection of that data. But inevitably, everybody uses multiple cloud applications for business and personal purposes: Gmail, Office 365, iCloud, Facebook, etc…. Google Maps keeps the last 10 years of your travel itinerary. Google gives me a map of everywhere I have been in the last month. By data mining, shopping, and whatever other interests you and your family may have, are potentially exposed. My robot vacuum cleaner has my household floor plan. Without governmental restrictions and law, the Cambridge Analytics scandal will happen over and over.
Using cloud applications (also referred as (Software-as-a-Service), consumers, for the most part, interact with the service provider directly. Major service providers leverage at least one or several infrastructure providers (also referred as (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) for data hosting, email notifications, or SMS messaging. Infrastructure companies are transparent to end-users: what server, where, and what type of infrastructure hosts the cloud application uses, is not visible to the end-user.
For privacy, a commitment from the entire chain, from the application on your phone, to the cloud application, and the infrastructure is required. While your service provider may not set out to violate your privacy, infrastructure companies may not care so much about your data sovereignty. The end-user has no control over the complexity of the multiple layers involved in using that app.
As an end- user, reading the “Term of Service” may be boring, but it’s the responsible thing to do before you hit the “I Agree” button. Personal information is at risk, and it’s good to know your exposures. The convenience of cloud applications is great, but reading the “Terms of Service” is a habit that must be adopted.
Signority seeks to protect the end-user. Our customers demand it. Signority has been offering eSignature applications for over 10 years. We make a point of having the Canadian data handled by our Canadian customers stay in Canada.
Canadian governmental organizations, not-for-profits, and private companies, enjoy using Signority services, from Canadian servers, to serve Canadian residents. Information such as insurance forms, finances, medical data, HR data such as employee social insurance numbers, pay rates, job offers, even a primary school’s field trip waivers with health card numbers, are all located in Canadian servers for Canadian residents. For Signority, the end customer is the owner of the data, and we protect that by data colocation. We do not allow 3rd parties to mine our customers’ data, nor do we allow “metadata” analysis. Signority avoids the ramifications of cross-border storage of data by simply not crossing the border.
When considering your eSignature provider, consider your customers privacy and security. This applies to both the public and private sector. Signority offers a private cloud with a complete data localization solution that alleviates the worry of where your customer data is anywhere complying with global legislations. For privacy, Signority is your technological partner. Read our blog about Signority’s data localization solution.