Governments around the world are strengthening laws and regulations to protect citizens’ data, preserve national security, and protect business interests. Last week at Microsoft Ignite we announced new Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 to help ensure you remain compliant with services to include SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange. The new Multi-Geo Capabilities in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and OneDrive provide global organizations a solution to maximizing the value of Office 365, including SharePoint and OneDrive, while meeting data residency and compliance requirements. Multi-geo capabilities provide you with a choice of geographical locations in which to store, manage, and secure your data by allowing a single Office 365 tenant to span multiple regions, storing data on a per-user or per-site basis.  So, whether you’re adding a new user to your organization or need to move an existing user, as well as their data, seamlessly and transparently to that user, to a new region, new multi-geo capabilities are designed to address those needs.   In a multi-geo configuration, your Office 365 Tenant consists of a central, default location, such as North America and one or more satellite locations.  In this scenario, a single Tenant can span across multiple locations ensuring your data resides within the boundaries of each respective geo.  Each geo in a multi-geo configuration is addressed with a unique Url specified when configuring the Office 365 Tenant, such as contosona or consotoeur to represent North America or Europe respectively. Information about multi-geo enabled Tenants such as geo locations, groups, and user information, is mastered in Azure Active Directory (AAD).  Since the Tenant information is mastered centrally and synchronized into each geo location, sharing and experiences involving anyone from your company contain global awareness.  For example, a user whose preferred OneDrive data location in Europe, can share with users in North America or other configured geo locations, and discover content created across the tenancy using services such as search and Office Delve.  In addition, independent policies can be configured at each geo location to include explicit sharing policies, eDiscovery, etc. Multi-Geo capabilities for OneDrive is in private preview today. If you’re interested and want to learn more visit the links below. OneDrive http://aka.ms/OneDriveMultiGeo

Resources

To learn more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 refer to the resources below: Watch and download Understanding Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 at https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/54705?source=sessions from Microsoft Ignite. Watch and download Multi-Geo Capabilities in OneDrive and SharePoint Online at https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos/53873 from Microsoft Ignite. Watch and download Exchange Online Multi-Geo Capabilities at https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/55160?source=sessions from Microsoft Ignite. Read more about Multi-Geo capabilities in Office 365 at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Introducing-Multi-Geo-in-Office-365/ba-p/107016. Watch Introducing Multi-Geo capabilities in Office 365 on Microsoft Mechanics at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d9-Vt2fArk&feature=youtu.be.