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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> For a small business the first thing you should be looking at is Office 365. Put it in the cloud, get rid of the VPN.

In Germany, this is forbidden by the data protection laws:

https://www.heise.de/news/Microsoft-Office-365-Die-Gruende-f...

So, from the article at least, the EU requires hard changes from MS regarding data storage. While the Germans are more complaining about the wording in the terms and conditions. Makes sense, I would have been surprised if my valued German administration had come to a different conclusion.

But honestly, this will be a) challenged by MS to defend their Office business in the EU and b) if that challenge doesn't work be solved by some other wording and / or changes to the data storage of Office 365 for EU based costumers.

Until then I have a hard believing all the companies, small to public international ones, will change back to non-cloud services anytime soon.

Almost every week in my business I get told I can't do something because of German law (normally by our local staff), and on closer inspection I find it to be not exactly the case. It is a big joke in the UK!

In this article I find references to the online versions of the Office apps and terms and conditions that the many German regional bodies are arguing over. This sounds like something MS have to sort out with the regulator, not something I have to do.

You make your own judgement, but I have users on 365 in Germany and they are staying there. We do not store customer data on 365.

> In Germany, this is forbidden by the data protection laws:

Does that mean Office 365 is illegal in Germany??

fwiw its gernerally frowned upon, illegal only for use in an official capacity dealing with pii

It's not so much that Office 365 is illegal as much as it is the storing of GDPR sensitive data in it (ie PII of customers and/or employees) because the German government does not trust Microsoft to not share the data with US spy agencies. (And does not trust the US spy agencies to not share sensitive data with other strategically interesting US companies. America First and all that.)

> illegal as much as it is the storing of GDPR sensitive data in it (ie PII of customers and/or employees)

A lot of data is GDPR sensitive. Also, if some of the data must not be processed by Office 365, a lot of the advantage of Office 365 disappears.

I know that, but (certainly from the viewpoint of the German government) that is a problem for Microsoft and the Office 365 team, not for Germany and its citizens.

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