Data processing agreement (DPA)
The contract GDPR requires when a vendor processes personal data on your behalf: what, why, how it is protected, who else gets it.
Article 28 of GDPR lists what it must cover, including acting only on your instructions, confidentiality, security, deleting or returning data at the end, and approval of subprocessors. Most SaaS and AI vendors publish a standard DPA and a subprocessor list. For B2B software, customers will ask for your DPA, and your answer depends on the DPAs of every vendor you use.
Related terms
- GDPR: The EU regulation on personal data: lawful basis, minimal data, user rights and breach reporting, for anyone handling EU residents’ data.
- Multi-tenancy (multi-tenant SaaS): One application and one deploy serving many client companies, with each client’s data kept apart.
- Local LLM: A language model running on hardware you control instead of a provider’s API, so documents stay where you decide.
