Offshored Data Privacy: Determining the Factors and their relative Effect

For many US based companies’ offshoring, especially IT services, has become an inevitable part of business strategy. However, preserving the privacy of the sensitive information of offshored data remains as one of the major challenges and concerns. In this paper, we identify factors that affect the privacy preserving conduct of the offshore vendors and their employees towards clients’ data. We deploy a positivist case study method to examine the proposed relationships. We collected qualitative data through interviews from the project managers of client organizations as well as from the project managers of vendor organizations to test our proposed model. The result shows that the code of conduct set by the vendor organizations plays the most effective role in privacy preserving behavior of the vendors’ employees.