Solving Data Residency Issues with the Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo Tenant

Companies operate increasingly on the global stage and are therefore required to obey the data protection and compliance regulations in the individual regions and countries. Cue the data residency requirements. But how is this possible in the age of the cloud? The multi-geo tenant in Microsoft 365 offers the perfect answer.

Microsoft announced the multi-geo capabilities for Microsoft 365 (status: private preview) during the MS Ignite 2017. They allow Microsoft 365 users to configure their environment in such a way that it can extend across several datacenter regions. This enables the individual selection of specific data center regions in which the data for each user or user group will be stored, leading to easier adherence to the compliance or data residency requirements (data storage location) and other benefits.

In a nutshell, a company with branches in North America, Australia and the European Union (for instance) can save its data in the respectively applicable regions (data-at-rest) and then manage them from a central location, instead of using the individual dedicated tenant for the particular area as before.

Users will doubtless be rubbing their hands at the thought of the added speed they will acquire by storing their data “closer” to the individual users. But Microsoft is keen to emphasize that this was not the principal motivation. Indeed, the benefit is likely to be somewhat insignificant, as any performance problems – in the majority of cases at least – are due to external network issues that are therefore unrelated to the storage location and the provider.

Looking back, the only solution for multinational companies so far has been to operate a dedicated Microsoft 365 environment (multi-tenants) in the respective country or region. But this elevated the complexity of the overall solution, required additional infrastructure and upped the administrative workload as well. The extra costs were actually quite substantial from a TCO perspective. For instance, it was not possible to use the same SMTP namespace for the individual Microsoft 365 tenants. What’s more, displaying the free and booked times in calendar entries of the individual tenants, i.e. users (for instance to synch calendars), took some fiddling around, also.

Microsoft is offering an alternative to this procedure with its new Microsoft 365 multi-geo capabilities. The needs of multinational companies are addressed additionally using geo-satellite locations (geo-storage instances) based on a central location (tenant). The necessary information in this regard (locations, groups, users etc.) is managed in a central Azure Active Directory. The data (e.g. mailboxes) are kept at their assigned storage locations.

The following diagram illustrates this example very well, based on an Exchange multi-geo topology:

The following multi-geo services are offered or are under development as part of the ongoing preview:

• Exchange Online
• OneDrive for Business
• SharePoint Online

The roadmap for other Microsoft 365 services – for instance Microsoft Teams – has not yet been announced.

The multi-geo features are currently in the private preview phase, which is running in the following countries/regions:

• Asian-Pacific region
• Australia
• Canada
• European Union (EMEA)
• India
• United Kingdom (UK)
• United States (North America)
• South Korea
• France is currently in planning.

There is currently no precise date on which the Microsoft 365 multi-geo capabilities will go on general release, thus bringing the preview phase to an end. Interested customers are invited to apply as participants in this private preview, as it is not a feature that can be enabled by mouse click. Equally, it is presently unknown how these capabilities will affect the licensing situation. So the best courses of action would be to watch and wait for new announcements or to apply as a company to participate in the preview.