Slack launches data residency in Australia

Slack has rolled out data residency for its Australian customers, meaning more organisations can choose to store their data locally on Australian soil, rather than in a data center halfway around the world.

Slack selected Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris as the first four regions outside the United States to offer data residency to its users.

Slack hopes that teams in highly regulated sectors such as financial services, government, and healthcare, will be encouraged by local data residency and increase uptake. Slack says that data residency also gives global teams more control as to where their data is stored.

Customers can select a region associated with a local data center. Slack will then store multiple types of data within that data center.

Customer data types include messages, posts, and snippets; files uploaded to Slack; a search index of customer data; app or bot-generated messages or files.

Slack explains, "If a new workspace or Enterprise Grid org is set up in a data residency region, customer data will be stored in the selected region starting the date the workspace or org is created.

"For existing customers wishing to enable data residency, customer data can be migrated to a selected data region at any time. When a workspace or Enterprise Grid's data is migrated, all new user data will start residing in this region. However, old data will continue to live in the United States. Over time, Slack will migrate the data stored in the U.S. to the customer's selected data region.

However, Slack says that other customer data like user profile information, channel names, channel topics, or channel descriptions, may not be able to be stored in some regions.

Slack says that other data may be stored in regions beyond the customer's selected region. These include workspace and channel membership information, analytics and quality of service data, seat count, usage, and revenue data, and Slack-generated IDs.

Organisations that use shared channels in the same data region will keep all of their customer data in that region.

However, organisations that use shared channels in different data regions will find that: Each organisation's messages will live in their respective data regions; the search index for the shared channel will live in both regions; and if the shared channel is disconnected, both organisations will get a copy of the other party's previously shared data.

Slack says its security program is protected by enterprise-grade security and compliance.