Slack brings data residency to the UK
Move is designed to target customers in highly-regulated industries

Slack is launching data residencies in Europe and the UK so organisations can have greater control over their data by choosing where it is stored.
The announcement follows the launch of residencies in Germany, France, Australia, and Japan in October.
Traditionally Slack stores data in the US, but to help its global customers have more control over their data, the company is opening up data residencies outside of the US, which includes one in London.
The move is designed to tap into those organisations currently not using Slack as they're unable to store data locally and comply with industry regulations, such as those in financial services, the public sector, and healthcare.
"We've listened to our customers regulatory concerns around having their data hosted outside of the country or region where they operate, and our expansion of data residency into the UK is in direct response to their requests," Ilan Frank, VP of product, enterprise at Slack told Information Age.
"We are making data residency technically and financially accessible so that users have the freedom of where they want to store their data."
Slack is one of a number of cloud-based services that enable remote working to see a huge spike in usage since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the UK is the third-largest global market for the company, behind the US and Japan, in terms of daily active users.
User-generated data, such as message posts, files, and searches, can now be stored within the desired region, according to the company, and regardless of whether the data is in transit or rest, it's always encrypted.
Although existing customers can move their organisation's data to a new residency region, the entire business must be rooted in a single region.
ITPro Newsletter
A daily dose of IT news, reviews, features and insights, straight to your inbox!
Bobby Hellard is IT Pro's reviews editor and has worked on Cloud Pro and Channel Pro since 2018.
In his time at IT Pro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.
Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.
He has been a journalist for ten years, originally covering sports, before moving into business technology with IT Pro. He has bylines in The Independent, Vice and The Business Briefing.
Contact him at bobby.hellard@futurenet.com or find him on Twitter: @bobbyhellard
A daily dose of IT news, reviews, features and insights, straight to your inbox!
Thank you for signing up to ITPro. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.