I’m packing up my game and I’m heading to Europe….
Microsoft announced on June 16th their Sovereign Cloud. I am American, but I have been following the ever changing tech landscape not only in Europe but world wide. However this solution could roll out to other countries in the world. The biggest part is, YOUR data in the cloud lives only in Europe and doesn’t leave Europe. This makes regulatory compliance less of a headache. This also allows you more flexibility on if you want to engage the Public Cloud (Azure, M365, etc) or the Private Cloud (Azure Local) or even a hyperconverged of the two.
Private Cloud, you say?
This option is very exciting, it gives business to bring back on premise not only compute, storage, networking, virtualization, VDI and M365 Services. This is in preview and will be GA later this year. This allows businesses to be more in control of their data and where it lives. We can in the US make good use of this as well, if this ever becomes an option for us.
HOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLD UP….. Did you say M365 on premise?
This little piece has piqued my interest as well.
Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacenter.
This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organizations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. Built on our validated reference architecture and powered by Azure Local, Microsoft 365 Local enables customers to deploy Microsoft productivity workloads like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server in their own datacenters or sovereign cloud environments — with full control on security, compliance and governance.
Private Sovereign Cloud is designed for governments, critical industries and regulated sectors that need to meet the highest standards of data residency, operational autonomy and disconnected access.
This is not only a backtrack on Microsoft’s side, but an exciting announcement. You can have Teams, SPO, OneDrive, Email in one package running on Azure Local. In theory this is exciting and I can see businesses who have either geopolitical fears, or those who want to use Azure Services while keeping everything within your local network.
This sounds amazing, let’s get everything back on premise.
Hold up sparky. I am sure there will be a lot of feature parity in the beginning. Azure Local (Azure Stack HCI) is ever evolving and I suspect M365 Local will be the same way. I am curious how this will evolve and if this will expand to other regions.
