Microsoft Opens Up Office 365 Datacenters in the UK

This week Microsoft announced that they have now established two datacenters in the United Kingdom for their Office 365 customers.

The move provides several benefits to company customers in the UK by not only providing a shorter route to the server Office 365 data is stored on,  but also these in-country capabilities:

In addition, having these datacenters in the UK helps customers in various industries such as banking, government and healthcare insure they comply with the legal and regulatory requirements of their industries.

The two new datacenters in the UK are located in Durham and London and they provide Office 365, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online services.

"With the availability of our new U.K. regions, Azure now offers customers 28 regions — available today — with six more coming soon for a total of 34, more than any other major cloud provider. In addition, Microsoft Cloud services have earned the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations of any public cloud provider. In the first half of 2017, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will join the currently available line up in the U.K."

According to a FAQ posted by Microsoft on the Office 365 Datacenter Global Map page any UK based Office 365 customers who signed up before September 2nd of this year will have their data located in EMEA datacenters.

There is no indication on this page what customers in the UK can do to request that their data be moved to the UK datacenters but if Microsoft does look to migrate that data from outside of the UK they will give the customer 30 days notice of the pending movement of their data.

Microsoft is the first global cloud services provider to offer their services from within the UK.

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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