Where your data lives

Kept in South Africa

• Your business records (customers, quotes, invoices, users and the audit trail) are stored in Google Cloud's Johannesburg region, called africa-south1.
• DIANO's server code runs in africa-south1 too, with one exception: the function that sends e-mail runs in Google's us-central1 region in the United States.
• The daily and weekly backups, the nightly copies and each company's own backup are kept in africa-south1.

Kept or handled outside South Africa

• Files you upload, such as your company logo, signatures and stored documents, are kept in Google's us-east1 region in the United States.
• One more copy of the nightly backup is kept in Google's europe-west1 region in Belgium, in case the whole South African region fails.
• Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication, which Google runs only from data centres in the United States. It holds each user's name, e-mail address and a protected form of the password, not your business records.
• E-mails that DIANO sends, such as invitations and password links, go out through Google Workspace (Gmail). A copy of each e-mail is kept in the database for 7 days, then deleted automatically.
• Google's own system logs for DIANO are kept in Google's global log store for 30 days.
• The web pages themselves are served by Firebase Hosting from Google's worldwide network, so they load quickly everywhere. They contain no business records.

Why this matters for your tax records

SARS's rule says electronic tax records must be kept at a place in South Africa, unless a senior SARS official gives permission to keep them elsewhere. (Government Notice 787 of 1 October 2012, rule 4, made under Tax Administration Act section 30.) Source

Ask your tax adviser whether the copies kept outside South Africa affect you. The plan to bring uploaded files home is in the Roadmap below.

Other companies that process your data (sub-processors)

Google's own list of the companies it uses: Google Cloud's own list of sub-processors.