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As part of a wider cloud storage rollout, US tech giant Microsoft has offered to store the personal data of its customers in the European Union.
Microsoft announced this week that it would be upgrading its EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, an initiative by the company “to store and process customer data and personal data for our Microsoft enterprise online services”.
Prior to the new features, Microsoft had already allowed the processing and storage of some EU data, but with the upgrade, data within system-generated logs, which is automatically produced through the use of its services, is now also included.
“Through significant investments and dedicated efforts by thousands of engineers, our EU Data Boundary now enables the processing and storage of all data in the EU across Microsoft core cloud services – Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365,” wrote Julie Brill, corporate vice-president and chief privacy officer at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s latest move comes as technology companies continue to increase their investments in EU data storage, particularly following changes to the region’s privacy and security legislation.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) previously stated in October that it would enable its EU servers to store customer data.
Microsoft added that later in the year, the next phase of its EU Data Boundary rollout will commence. The next step will involve storing temporary transfer data related to technical support cases.
“We will ensure that support data is stored within the boundary, and when access from outside the EU is required to enable world-class support, we will limit and secure any temporary data transfer required through technical approaches such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure,” added Brill.
“Our EU Data Boundary solution goes beyond European compliance requirements and reflects our commitment to provide trusted cloud services that are designed to take advantage of the full power of the public cloud while respecting European values and providing the most advanced sovereignty controls and features available in the industry today.”
Prior to the launch of these solutions, data storage was difficult to manage for major companies. As the solutions have become so large, it has become difficult to track down exactly where specific data is stored.
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