Microsoft Corp said on Thursday that European Union cloud customers will be able to process and store portions of their data in the region from January 1.
The phased rollout of “EU data boundaries” will apply to all of its core cloud services – green, Microsoft 365, dynamics 365 and electricity communication.
Large enterprises have become increasingly worried about the international flow of customer data since EU Introducing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, helping to protect user privacy.
The bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, is working through proposals to protect the privacy of European users whose data is transferred to the United States.
Julie Brill, Chief Privacy Officer at Microsoft, told Reuters: “As we dig deeper into this project, we knew we needed to take a more phased approach.
“The first phase will be customer data. And then as we move into the next stages, we’ll move logging data, service data, and other types of data into the boundary, ” she said. She said phase two will be completed by the end of 2023 and phase three will be completed by 2024.
Microsoft operates more than a dozen data centers across European countries including France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland.
For large companies, data storage has become so large and distributed across many countries that it is difficult for them to understand where their data is located and whether it complies with rules like GDPR or not. are not.
“We are creating this solution to help our customers feel more confident and able to clearly discuss with regulators where their data is being processed and stored,” said Brill. store”.
Microsoft previously said it would challenge government requests for customer data, and that it would financially compensate any customers whose data it shared violated the GDPR.
