Friday 9 September 2016

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





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