For some organisations, the geographical location of cloud data has proven an impediment to moving their own systems in that direction. While providers such as Microsoft and Google have long had European datacentres, certain sectors who are governed by compliancy requirements or suppliers of sensitive government bodies such as the military. GCHQ, Border Agency or NHS, have found that this just isn’t good enough and data needs to be held within UK datacentres.
With Brexit now less than 2 years away and increased data protection laws on the way, nobody is really sure what will happen to currently accepted shared standards; will the statement “the data is held within the EU” will still be an acceptable answer for the rest of us after 2019?
Microsoft has announced in the past few weeks that those with data residency requirements can request their Office 365 data to be moved to UK datacentres. There are however caveats (aren’t there always?)
- This isn’t an immediate move; Microsoft only pledges to move the data before September 2019.
- You have to commit before the 15th September 2017
- Microsoft states that such a move does limit their options to “optimise”. We would guess this perhaps means in terms of redundancy or performance, but it isn’t explicitly stated.
If you feel this move is applicable to your organisation then you can request the move and get into the queue from your Microsoft office 365 Admin panel. Look under Message Centre and follow the instructions from there.
A Microsoft article on this subject is available here: http://aka.ms/move