Microsoft announce new cloud options for Europe. There is an increasing push back from European organisations, particularly Government, against so many critical services and so much data all being run out of the US…this has been accelerated by the current geo-political situation too.
These announcements are Microsoft’s attempt to pre-emptively stem the flow of European customers away from their cloud services.
Altogether we’ve got:
- Sovereign Public Cloud
- Sovereign Private Cloud
- National Partner Clouds
- Microsoft 365 Local
- Data Guardian
- External Key Management
- Regulated Environment Management
Microsoft 365 Local is interesting but the MS announcement only talks about productivity workloads like Exchange Server & SharePoint Server. Does M365 Local include Teams, Stream, ClipChamp, Planner etc.? 🤷♂️
Sovereign Public Cloud
Will be offered across all existing European datacentre regions, for all European customers, across enterprise services such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Security and Power Platform.
Customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers.
Sovereign Private Cloud
Will support critical collaboration, communication and virtualization services workloads on Azure Local. This solution now integrates Microsoft 365 Local and the security platform with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements
National Partner Clouds
Available in France (Bleu) & Germany (Delos Cloud), these will offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure in an independently owned and operated environment.
Microsoft 365 Local
Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacentre.
This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organizations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. It remains to be seen exactly what is included and how the licensing works…
Data Guardian
Data Guardian will add an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to these systems and adds additional human and technical oversight whenever engineers outside of Europe need access.
All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time and will be logged in a tamper-evident ledger.
External Key Management
With external key management, customers can connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party.
Regulated Environment Management
The Regulated Environment Management service will allow customers to easily manage all these features in one place (for instance, configuring Data Guardian policies or reviewing access log entries).
The Microsoft announcement is here.
