Solutions · Privacy-focused organizations
Know where your data is,
and who can reach it.
For organizations whose obligations or principles require them to choose where business data is held, decide who can access it and inspect the software that processes it. Office Unbound is being designed to make those choices possible — and to be honest that making them is work.
Project status Office Unbound is in architecture and evaluation. None of the controls on this page is available, and no part of the platform has been independently reviewed.
Who this page is for
Law firms, medical and therapy practices, accountants, journalists, research groups, advocacy organizations, public bodies and businesses with strict contractual terms about client data all share a question that cloud productivity platforms answer only partly: where exactly is our data, and who other than us could read it?
Microsoft and Google publish detailed answers, offer regional data residency on some plans, provide customer-managed encryption options and are audited against many standards. For a lot of organizations those answers are sufficient. For others, the remaining facts are the problem: the provider operates the infrastructure, holds administrative access to it, is subject to the laws of the jurisdictions it operates in, and runs software the customer cannot inspect.
Office Unbound is being built so that an organization can run its productivity platform where it decides, under administrators it appoints, on software whose source it can read. That changes the questions. It does not make them go away.
Control and responsibility arrive together
Every form of control that self-hosting gives you comes with a matching responsibility that the cloud provider used to carry. This is the most important table on the page.
| Area | What you gain | What you take on |
|---|---|---|
| Data location | You choose the building, the country and the hardware where mail and files are stored. | Physical security, power, hardware failure, and the location of every backup copy, not only the primary. |
| Administrative access | Only administrators you appoint — your staff or a provider you contract — hold privileged access. | Vetting those people, protecting their credentials, and reviewing what they do. |
| Encryption | You decide where data is encrypted and who holds the keys. | Key management. Lost keys mean lost data; poorly stored keys mean no protection. |
| Software | You can inspect the source and the component inventory of what you run. | Reading it, or arranging for someone to — inspection that nobody performs proves nothing. |
| Updates | You decide when changes reach your environment. | Applying security patches promptly. A delayed patch is an open vulnerability. |
| Logging and retention | You decide what is logged, for how long, and when it is deleted. | Logs are personal data too; keeping too much is a risk, keeping too little loses the audit trail. |
| Incidents | You see your own systems directly instead of waiting for a provider’s status page. | Detecting, investigating and reporting incidents, including any notification obligations you have. |
Self-hosting moves responsibility as well as control. A self-hosted platform that is poorly operated can be less private than a well-run cloud service.
That is not an argument against self-hosting. It is the reason Office Unbound’s planned documentation, defaults and administration tooling put as much weight on operating the platform safely as on its features. Organizations without the staff to operate it can choose an MSP they trust, keeping control of where data is held and the right to take it elsewhere.
What the platform is designed to provide
The privacy-relevant properties. Every one of them is Planned
- Self-hostingEvery service runs on infrastructure you or your provider operate. The initial target is Linux virtual machines on Proxmox VE.
- Data location choiceMail stores, file storage, databases and backups each placed where you decide, as separate workloads.
- Access controlRole-based administration, least privilege, MFA, session controls and audit logs of administrative access to user data.
- Independent security reviewReview of the platform by parties outside the project is a goal. None has taken place, and none will be claimed until it has.
- Retention and governanceRetention policies, audit trails, data exports and, where implemented, legal hold and discovery workflows.
- Software transparencyPublic source code, software bills of materials, release documentation and vulnerability advisories. The repository is not yet published.
- Data portabilityExport in open formats and documented configuration, so that leaving a provider — including Office Unbound itself — is possible.
- External integrations under your controlOptional services, such as additional email security filtering or telephony carriers, involve third parties; each is optional and should be assessed on its own terms.
Where data still leaves your infrastructure
Even a fully self-hosted platform exchanges data with the outside world, and a privacy assessment should account for each path:
- Email sent to external recipients is delivered to their providers, and incoming mail passes through the sender’s.
- Meetings with external guests carry their audio and video, and may need relay servers depending on network design.
- Telephony runs through a carrier you contract with.
- Shared links and guest access expose files to people outside the organization by design.
- Off-site backups are copies of everything, held wherever you send them.
- During migration, the assessment and transfer tools read from your existing cloud tenant with credentials you authorize.
Office Unbound makes no claim that using it makes an organization compliant with GDPR, HIPAA or any other law or standard, and holds no certification. Compliance depends on how a deployment is configured, operated, documented and governed, and on your own legal advice. The platform is intended to make controls available; using them correctly remains the operator’s responsibility.
What officeunbound.com itself collects is described in the privacy notice.
Need to know where your data lives?
Tell us about your requirements — data location, access, retention — and the workloads you need to cover. Privacy and security needs shape the controls built first.