Microsoft has announced that the first phase of its European Union data boundary plan will go live on January 1, 2023, allowing users to store and process customer information within the EU.
The “EU data boundary” will be phased-in across all of Microsoft’s core cloud services, including Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power BI platform.
“Today, we are announcing that, on January 1, 2023, Microsoft will begin a phased rollout of our EU Data Boundary solution to public sector and commercial customers in the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA),” Microsoft said in a blog post. Adding: “With this release, Microsoft expands on existing local storage and processing commitments, greatly reducing data flows out of Europe and building on our industry-leading data residency solutions.”
The EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, as the arrangement for local storage and processing of cloud services’ customer data is dubbed, is designed to react to a geographic surge in demand for digital sovereignty, which has been exacerbated by legal complexities over EU-US data flows arising from a conflict between the bloc’s data protection rights and US surveillance practices.
While Microsoft provided no new details on how the plan will work, it previously stated in March that it will contest any request for data transfer that does not comply with the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy and Security Framework.
The move comes just two days after the EU Commission announced that the procedure of approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework had officially begun.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
