Microsoft starts phased rollout of EU data boundary

EU customers’ data now being stored in Europe

As of 1 January 2023 Microsoft’s European Union cloud customers are now able to process and store parts of their data in the EU region. The phased rollout of its EU data boundary will apply to all of its core cloud services namely Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI platform.

"As we dived deeper into this project, we learned that we needed to be taking a more phased approach," Julie Brill, Microsoft’s chief Privacy officer, told Reuters.

"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 kind 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.

Big businesses have become increasingly anxious about the international flow of customer data since the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, which protects user privacy.

Microsoft operates more than a dozen datacentres across European countries including France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

For big companies, data storage has become so large and distributed across so many countries that it becomes difficult for them to understand where their data resides and if it complies with rules such as GDPR.

The bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, is working through proposals to protect the privacy of European users whose data is transferred to the United States.

"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," added Brill.