Microsoft continues to expand its regional coverage with datacenters all over the world. In October, the company unveiled Azure hosted locally in Australia, and it just announced that Office 365 is now available in Japan, hosted on local datacenters.
Japanese regulations limit certain customers, such as financial services, healthcare, and government, to hosting their data inside Japan. Microsoft will not only host new customers from Japan in datacenters within the country, it is preparing to move all current Office 365 customers with a Japanese business address to the new Japanese datacenters, as they become available.
Microsoft has not only been expanding its coverage to more regions around the world, but has been fighting battles both in the courts and publicly to keep locally stored data protected and controlled by local regulations. The battle is ongoing, but Microsoft and all the data storage players, are very concerned about attempts to circumvent the local storage of data in a “cloud first” world.
