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Data Sovereignty Coming to Microsoft 365

 It's been a minute, but I am back with some absolutely exciting news. Just the other day, I came across an announcement that is sure to send shockwaves through the Microsoft 365 community - the implementation of Microsoft 365 Local: Microsoft's answer to keeping your M365 data sovereign.

Over the past little while, more and more companies and organizations have been pivoting towards local alternatives to Microsoft 365 as the lines between data ownership and residency are getting blurred. Given that a plethora of countries in the EU started to pull away from Microsoft 365 and Azure due to lack of control over where their data was going, Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 Local, which gives organizations the ability to bring the best of the Microsoft 365 environment into their own environment.

What does this mean for organizations? Instead of hosting the infrastructure required on servers in the cloud - companies can now opt to host the services on their own infrastructure, providing more control over where the data goes. In addition to this, any support provided by Microsoft will be done by support engineers located in the country of origin. Pretty cool right? 

However, I still have some questions:

  1. What does this mean for cloud apps? Will developers of Microsoft 365 apps now need to adjust their programs to accommodate to both environments? Could this open up a new release stream for product releases? How would companies get their data down from third-party apps that are already hosted in Azure Cloud? This is one critical question that will need to be answered, and I can see this also becoming a potential roadblock for organizations and developers. I can also see it opening up doors for companies to introduce app migration tools which can help achieve this (which opens up my next question).
  2. How will current organizations be able to transition from cloud back to on-premise? Will Microsoft introduce tooling to make this possible? How would that pan out for Entra and Active Directory as well as other identity providers and features in Azure Cloud? What if they decide to go back to cloud, what then?
  3. Finally, where does this take the Power Platform? What will happen to cloud flows? What if these flows are still needed to interact with other platforms such as SAP or other cloud connectors? Where will that information be processed?
All of these things I hope will be answered relatively soon, but I can say with confidence that this will be a game changer! For government this will allow for tighter control around data sovereignty in high security environments, give companies the ability to harden their data controls, and even create more opportunities to learn for M365 admins.

Right now, this new initiative is targeted for EU countries, but I hope to see this in North America soon. If Microsoft could do Canada next, that'd be great!

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