US Judge orders MSFT to hand over data stored in the EU

As I have previously discussed (on Software Advice in this article) the US laws regarding the rights for the US legal authorities to order US owned companies to hand over data is very strong. Hence, if one has sensitive data that might be of interest to any government agencies in the US, one should think once or twice about storing it in a data center owned by a US company (like Salesforce.com, Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc.).

A recent case in in New York has shown that this is not on theory but very much practice. In this case regarding an email account probably on outlook.com however the difference to SalesForce.com or CRM Online is purely academic.

On the positive side, Microsoft are fighting back trying to protect their customer, something I am very happy about. I do hope they do this for all customers.

The other direct positive side to this of course, is that Microsoft CRM can be aquired from other sources than from companies based in USA. For instance a standard CRM On-premise installation, or a partner hosted installation, which there are many service providers of, like Midpoint and our my own company CRM-Konsulterna in Sweden. SalesForce.com on the other hand, do not have this option, so if you have sensitive data, be careful, it might be ordered into the wrong hands.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Swedish IRS hacked - shows glitch in responsibilies of online services for government agencies

There is currently rather a lot of media in Sweden about a computer system hosted by a larger Software Integrator outsourced by the Swedish IRS. This system was hacked and about 9000 client accounts were compromised. The discussion in the media is if this a government agency really can delegate this kind of responsibility to a third party or if there will always be some fundamental responsiblity for maintaining the security at the government agency? The security experts and even the Swedish Secretary of IT, Anna-Karin Hatt, indicated that this kind of responsibility could not be delegated.

This question is very relevant in the case of CRM systems in general and Microsoft Dynamics CRM in particular. It would then seem more or less impossible from an government agency CIO perspective to use any kind of cloud based service for line of business systems like CRM/xRM as this would imply that it is impossible to fully maintain the control required over the information in the system. This is no problem for us working with Dynamics CRM as it can be deployed on-premise, but bad news for anyone looking to work with SalesForce.com or any other pure cloud based service as they cannot be used in such conditions.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se