Microsoft announced a number of new cloud offerings today including one which will solve the company’s European cloud problesm.
The problem is that Microsoft is US company and its country delights in spying on its allies. The EU fears that the NSA could get a court order and force Microsoft to hand over data from its European clouds and force it not to tell anyone.
Microsoft has come up with a wizard wheeze by creating a product called Azure Deutschland — a German cloud region that will offer Azure services that come not directly from Microsoft, but from the German data trustee
Deutsche Telekom.
It not only makes sure that data remains in Germany, but also means that Microsoft can’t actually get to the data itself. By operating under a German company, the NSA can’t force Vole to do squat.
In fact, while the region offers redundancy and backup, it does so through a private network to ensure that none of the bits being backed up even go through the public Internet where they might stray onto foreign soil.
Germany has some of the strictest data privacy protection laws on the books, and Microsoft said that Deutsche Telekom will have strict protocols regarding when Microsoft is allowed access, even for support:
