Keeping More Data in the European Union

We’ve written quite a bit over the last few months about data protection, privacy and, of course, GDPR.

We’ve always been very cautious about how our data and that of our clients is handled. Wherever possible we’ve always tried to keep data in Ireland or at least firmly within the European Union. However in some instances our hands were tied.

As an ICANN accredited registrar we are required to escrow registration data. What that means in simple terms is that we encrypt and backup a copy of all the registration data associated with gTLD domain names on our credentials and store that data with a provider that ICANN has authorised. The idea is that if there’s some kind of disaster the registration data for domains associated with our credentials will be safe.

Until very recently the only provider that we could use was based in the US. This was far from ideal and both ourselves and other European registrars raised this as an issue in the past. Fortunately in recent months ICANN has engaged with Denic, the .de domain name registry, to offer escrow services to EU registrars such as ourselves.

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, we planned on switching to an EU based escrow provider as soon as we could. I’m happy to say that we’ve now made that switch. (Big thanks to our technical team for their work in making this happen in a timely fashion!)

What does this mean for our clients?

In practical terms very little. It does, however, reinforce our commitment to respecting our clients’ privacy and keeping their data within the EU.