DFederal and state data protection officers have serious concerns about using Microsoft 365 products. This is the result of a decision by the Data Protection Conference (DSK), the body of independent German data protection supervisory authorities in Germany, which was published over the weekend. For authorities, this means that they can only use the common cloud-based Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook or the popular chat program Teams “after intensive examination and considerable justification”, according to the data protection officer of Baden-Württemberg , Stefan Brink.
In companies, too, use is likely to become more difficult in the future: it is not officially prohibited, and the data protection conference does not issue any specific product warnings, as Brink made clear. The data protection conference is also not authorized to do this. However, those responsible for IT in companies would have to ensure in the future that the data protection of employees and customers would not be violated when using the products. “It’s going to be difficult,” Brink warned.
