Microsoft Corp has announced that its European Union cloud customers will be able to process and store parts of their data in the region from January 1, 2023.
The phased rollout of its 'EU data boundary' will apply to all of Microsoft's core cloud services: Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power BI platform.
In recent times, organizations have become increasingly worried and anxious about the international flow of customer data since the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, which protects user privacy.
The bloc's executive arm, the European Commission, is presently working through several proposals for safeguarding the privacy of European users whose data is transferred to the United States.
"As we dived deeper into this project, we learned that we needed to be taken a more phased approach," Julie Brill, Microsoft's Chief Privacy Officer said. "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 kinds 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.
"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 operates more than a dozen data centres across European countries including France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland.