Microsoft Corp said on Thursday its European Union cloud customers will be able to process and store parts of their data in the region from January 1.
The phased rollout of its “EU data
boundary” will apply to all of its core cloud services – Azure, Microsoft 365,
Dynamics 365 and Power BI platform.
Big businesses have become increasingly
anxious about the international flow of customer data since the EU introduced
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, which protects user
privacy.
The bloc's executive arm, the European
Commission, is working through proposals to protect the privacy of European
users whose data is transferred to the US.
"As we dived deeper into this project,
we learned that we needed to be taken more phased approach," Julie Brill,
Microsoft's Chief Privacy Officer, told Reuters.
"The first phase will be customer
data. And then as we move into the next phases, we will be moving logging data,
service data and other kind of data into the boundary," she said. The
second phase will be completed at the end of 2023 and phase three will be
completed in 2024, she said.
Microsoft operates more than a dozen
datacentres across European countries including France, Germany, Spain and
Switzerland.
For big companies, data storage has become
so large and distributed across so many countries that it becomes difficult for
them to understand where their data resides and if it complies with rules such
as GDPR.
"We are creating this solution to make
our customers feel more confident and to be able to have clear conversations
with their regulators on where their data is being processed as well as
stored," Brill said.
Microsoft has previously said it would
challenge government requests for customer data, and that it would financially
compensate any customer whose data it shared in breach of GDPR.
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