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The
phased rollout of its “EU data boundary” will apply to all of
its core cloud services – Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and
Power BI platform.
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.
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.
"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, 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.
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.
"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 has previously said it would challenge government
requests for customer data, and that it would financially
compensate any customer whose data it shared in breach of GDPR.
(Reporting by Martin Coulter and Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by
Josie Kao)
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