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I'm just learning about Azure so forgive me for my naivety. I work for a federal government that would be very hesitant to have their applications and data hosted in another country. Could a local company offer "Azure" services? i.e. could software developers in a government department build their applications and deploy them to the Azure cloud, ensuring that their data stays within the country? Or would they have to look at a non-Microsoft cloud provider?

Mogsdad
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knowledgequester
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5 Answers5

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Data and Compute will reside in the datacenter you specify. Blobs, Tables and Queues are also backed up automatically to a paired data center:

  • San Antonio <--> Chicago
  • Dublin <--> Amsterdam
  • Hong Kong <--> Singapore

You can opt-out of cross-datacenter data backup if data sovereignty becomes an issue. Once opted-out, data would only be in the specified data center, and you'd need to handle DR on your own (by possibly backing up data to on-premises storage).

Aside from those 6 datacenters, Fujitsu runs a Windows Azure data center in Japan. See this press release for more info.

David Makogon
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  • Ah, and there I was trying not to mention us by name :-) – Steve Morgan Mar 08 '12 at 23:51
  • It is worth mentioning that as MS is a US company they will comply with US laws concerning requests for data stored therein even if the data centre the data is in is not actually in the US. This may not be compatible with what your government's requirements. – knightpfhor Mar 09 '12 at 00:16
  • @knightpfhor Fujitsu isn't a US company, however. Just sayin' – Steve Morgan Mar 09 '12 at 06:48
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Yes, when you create your Azure service you can specify what region (of the country) it runs in.

onnoweb
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I'm not sure if you know this, but the Federal CIO (Vivek Kundra) is really pushing hard for Agencies to move to the cloud. You might want to check out Info.Apps.Gov for guidelines on the Federal Cloud initiative and resources for what you can and can't do.

To answer your immediate question: No. Only MS hosts Azure to my knowledge. I do know that Amazon is bending over backwards however to accommodate Government clients and you can control which datacenters are used on that service. MS appears to have a similar capability per the other answer to this question.

JohnFx
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As far as I can tell, these are the only locations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Services_Platform#Datacenters

If they're that concerned about data security though, they should deal directly with Microsoft, not buy Azure services that same way a client usually would. Microsoft may be able to arrange something depending on budget (but probably not).

Edit: What I'm basically saying is, Microsoft is not going to arbitrarily do special licensing. Meaning you either need a large enough budget to convince MS to build a data center in your country, or you need some other way of convincing MS to allow Azure services hosted in your country. Also, I hate to sound paranoid, but if you're worried about America seeing your data, you likely should avoid Ameican companies.

Corbin
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If there isn't a Windows Azure Data Centre in the relevant country, but you still want to use Azure, you'll need to look at a hybrid cloud model where data remains resident in a private cloud. However, in-flight data can still present complications for some organisations and Azure may not be the right answer in all cases.

If you like, I can talk about it some more using Chat. The company I work for specialises in just these cases and has the only production Windows Azure data centre that isn't owned by Microsoft (and isn't in the US). Probably best not go into further specifics here, though, for fear of my answer looking like pure spam!

Steve Morgan
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