I was asked a question about Microsoft 365 Commercial data residency and if there was somehow a possibility of a customer’s data being moved, even if temporarily into Canada, Mexico or some other country, potentially violating regulatory compliance for the organization.
The documentation is quite explicit: Data in M365’s core services is stored in the Default Geography selected during Entra ID tenant creation.
- Overview and Definitions – Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn
“When a Microsoft Entra ID Tenant is created, a country/region is provided by the customer during the sign-up process. This country/region determines the Default Geography for all Microsoft 365 services. In some cases, not all services are able to provision in this single Default Geography. See Microsoft 365 Service provisioning mapping below for a description.”
- Overview of Product Terms Data Residency – Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn
“Office 365 Services: If Customer provisions its tenant in … the United States, Microsoft stores the following Customer Data at rest only within that Geo:- (1) Exchange Online mailbox content (e-mail body, calendar entries, and the content of e-mail attachments),
- (2) SharePoint site content and the files stored within that site,
- (3) files uploaded to OneDrive,
- (4) Microsoft Teams chat messages (including private messages, channel messages, meeting messages and images used in chats), and for customers using Microsoft Stream (on SharePoint), meeting recordings, and
- (5) any stored content of interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot or Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to the extent not included in the preceding commitments.”
BACKGROUND
Note that even maintenance on cloud instances continues to be done within the US service boundary. Data for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams is replicated across datacenter regions within the country of residency to allow maintenance to be done. No, we do not classify Canada or Mexico as the same “country” as the United States for the hosting of data for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams.
There are a few other services other than Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams that may be treated differently – specifically Planner & Viva Learning – that may be part of something called “Macro Region Geography 3 – Americas” that may include more data residency countries than the United States. Again, the only services listed that this is relevant to (as far as I can tell) are Planner and Viva Learning. Read more here:
(BTW: A long time ago – like 10 years ago – there was a scenario in which Microsoft 365 Education customers could have their Microsoft 365 data stored at rest outside of the US but that hasn’t been the case for many years… but there’s still old comments about this one certain small web discussions,)
kurtsh
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