UK data residency option in Office 365 Admin Center

For UK companies that currently have their data in the EU Microsoft has now pushed the option to have your data migrated to UK data centres into the Office 365 Admin Portal.

Simply login, Go to Settings | Organisation Profile | Data residency option | and you will be able to make the request.

Edit the options and you can approve the move which Microsoft will complete within 24 months of September 15th 2017.

Oliver Moazzezi – Office Servers and Services MVP

Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi

Requiring your Office 365 data to move to UK datacentre regions

Hey all,

If you are signed up for Office 365 Message Center digests in your Office 365 tenant you should have received the following information:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Information about moving your data to the United Kingdom datacenter region
MC96864
Published On : 18 March 2017
Expires On : 30 September 2017


Action required by 15 September 2017

Customers with data residency requirements who would like to have their core customer data moved to the UK datacenter region will need to request a move before 15 September 2017. Data moves will complete by 15 September 2019. We recommend that you take no action unless your organization requires core customer data to be stored at rest in the UK datacenter region. By choosing to move your data, customers limit Microsoft's possibilities to optimize the location of their core customer data at rest in either their current or the UK datacenter region.

How does this affect me?
If your organization has a requirement to store core customer data at rest within UK, you will have to request a move via the Office 365 admin center. The deadline for requesting your move is 15 September 2017. Data moves will complete by 15 September 2019. No action is required if you do not have data residency requirements or if you were previously notified of a data move completing. If you do not request to move your data, we may still move your customer data to the UK datacenter region as part of our optimization procedures. In either case, Microsoft will respect the data residency commitments made in the Microsoft Online Services Terms.
                      
What do I need to do to prepare for this change?
You can review the location of your core customer data at rest and request to move your data in the Organization Profile section of the Office 365 admin center. Please click Additional Information to learn more about the move program and instructions to request a move.
                      

Additional information
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mor information is available at "Moving core data to new Office 365 datacenter regions"

However the general takeaway for this latest Message Center notification is that if you require the move, it must be requested before 15th September 2017. That's 6 months away - so make sure you start the process soon.
Take care,

Oliver Moazzezi – Office Servers and Services MVP

Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi

Taking a peek at a UK provisioned Office 365 Tenant

Microsoft announced on the 7th of September that the UK datacentres for Office 365 and Azure services were now available to a great fanfare here and here.


But if you provision a UK tenant (which is as simple as selecting your region as 'United Kingdom' when you sign up - it's not so straight forward on getting an existing tenant moved - more on that in a future blog post soon) what exactly, is in the UK?


From a previous blog post you can see how we can identify the location of the service instances for your Office 365 tenant. So let's take a look!


At first glance it doesn't look much different to a normal 'EU/EMEA' provisioned tenant. But looking further we can see both Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are clearly UK based.





That's all well and good - but services like Exchange Online Protection still show their location as EMEA? Let's dig a little deeper to see if this is true.


Grabbing the MX records for the tenant I can look up the IP addresses against the RIPE database.





Looking on RIPE I can see that in fact, Exchange Online Protection is actually UK based also.





At this time, I haven't been able to confirm the location of Skype for Business Online - i'll update the post when I have dug a little deeper - but we can see your Exchange and SharePoint services are now hosted fully within the UK.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last two months, I've become a father again and life is a little devoid of spare time (and sleep!) right now!

Update! You can view Microsoft datacentre regions here http://o365datacentermap.azurewebsites.net and it does appears that Skype for Business Online has not made it into the UK datacentres yet. The locales are London and Durham./

Have a a great week!
Oliver Moazzezi – Office Servers and Services MVP

Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi