Where your client data lives (and why it matters)

Your client file is your company’s most precious asset — and the only one you entrust entirely to a third party when you adopt a CRM. For a law or accounting firm, the question doubles as a professional matter: secrecy. Here are the four questions to ask — of us and of anyone.

Question 1: where, geographically?

“In the cloud” is not an answer. Data lives on a machine, in a country, under a jurisdiction. For French professional data, hosting in France isn’t a luxury: it guarantees that the applicable law is yours.

Question 2: isolated from whom?

A shared CRM can technically mix different clients’ data in one database. Ask about the isolation model: database per client, schema per client, or one big shared base. At Ystura: one database per client, isolated, with its own backups.

Question 3: backed up how?

A backup that has never been restored isn’t a backup, it’s a belief. Ask about frequency, depth (how far back can you go?) and — the awkward one — when the last restore test happened.

Question 4: recoverable when you leave?

Reversibility is a vendor’s honesty test. Your data must be exportable in a usable format — not a PDF, not a broken spreadsheet — at any time, unconditionally and without exit fees. A vendor who smooths the way in and hinders the way out is telling you everything about their confidence in their product.