Microsoft ‘Data Boundary’ for EU Customers Will Roll Out on January 1

Microsoft Corp stated on Thursday its European Union cloud clients will have the ability to course of and retailer elements of their knowledge within the area from January 1.

The phased rollout of its “EU data boundary” will apply to all of its core cloud companies – Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI platform.

Big companies have grow to be more and more anxious in regards to the worldwide circulation of buyer knowledge because the EU launched the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, which protects person privateness.

The bloc’s govt arm, the European Commission, is working via proposals to guard the privateness of European customers whose knowledge is transferred to the US.

“As we dived deeper into this project, we learned that we needed to be taken more phased approach,” Julie Brill, Microsoft’s Chief Privacy Officer, advised 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 stated. The second section will likely be accomplished on the finish of 2023 and section three will likely be accomplished in 2024, she stated.

Microsoft operates greater than a dozen datacentres throughout European international locations together with France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

For massive firms, knowledge storage has grow to be so giant and distributed throughout so many international locations that it turns into troublesome for them to grasp the place their knowledge resides and if it complies with guidelines reminiscent of GDPR.

“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 stated.

Microsoft has beforehand stated it could problem authorities requests for buyer knowledge, and that it could financially compensate any buyer whose knowledge it shared in breach of GDPR.