Hosting location question

[Cizzling]

We have just gone live with our Servicedesk team in Australia and our customers in the APAC-region. One of the questions I received during the customer portal introductions webinars that we run when on-boarding a new region was where the data was stored. As customers may upload sensitive data as part of reporting incidents they were curious to know where data was being stored.  

Also, when working out of our Melbourne office for a week my experience is that system performance is much slower than I am used to when I am in our Sweden office. There may of course be a number of reasons for this, but some of our customers also complained when working with the customer portal so I was wondering if you have received similar feedback from other customers in this region?

[Keith Stevenson]

Cizzling,

Thanks for the post. All data is stored within the geographical legal entity of your head office, for yourselves, this is currently EU with datacentres in the UK (as we are still part of EU at the moment) and all data is encrypted during transit (please see wiki.hornbill.com for further details on Data Centres). We adhere to the provisions under the Federal Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principles along with the Australian state\territories which have their own data protection legislation in addition to the Federal and APP: Information Privacy Act 2014 (Australian Capital Territory), Information Act 2002 (Northern Territory), Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (New South Wales), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Queensland), Personal Information Protection Act 2004 (Tasmania), and Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Victoria). And this is ensured under our ISO27018 certification.  

These do allow transmission of data outside of Australia as long as the entity (i.e. Hornbill) has taken reasonable steps to ensure that the data is secure and again our ISO certifications are proof that we have taken extreme measures to ensure data security. 

As for performance. We have a development team in Australia and they report that performance is as good if not better than any other EU hosted application.  There is always going to be an overhead from Australia due to their infrastructure. A ping to Australia averages around 333ms which is extremely slow and little can be done to improve that. We have however implemented local geocaching via Cloudflare for static content (i.e. Hornbill pages and applications but not your data) so that these are delivered (after the first request) from a server closer to the end user and we see that around 50% of our traffic hits these servers. The network latency issues can be seen if you login to the Hornbill.com support page and perform a status check with Show more. (Note that we have seen suboptimal performance when people use VPN to connect to the EU as this bypasses any local caching). 

Further information on our Data Centres, our security and controls\processes to ensure your data security are available via https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/FAQ:ISO

Hope this answers your queries and if you have require any further information please feel free to ask. 

Kind Regards

Keith Stevenson