SaaS Agreements – Data Protection – Cyber Security Issues

SaaS Customers are increasingly raising questions about the security provisions that SaaS suppliers include in their SaaS agreements and insisting on including onerous rights of audit to monitor and check compliance. Under the UK’s Data Protection Act (DPA) SaaS customers (data controllers) are required to take appropriate technical and organisational measures to prevent the:

unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data; and
accidental loss, destruction or damage to personal data.

In order to comply with these duties and avoid substantial fines SaaS customers need to ensure that SaaS suppliers have adequate security measures in place to prevent data protection breaches from occurring.

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SaaS Agreements – Data Protection – German Customers and Data Processing Agreements

If you are negotiating sales of SaaS solutions with German customers, you may be surprised by their insistence on having a separate written data processing agreement in addition to your SaaS agreement. This is a mandatory requirement under German data protection law (The BDSG) which imposes onerous obligations far beyond those found in most other EU data protection laws on the SaaS customer and the SaaS supplier.

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