This blog post covers some information about the data location of your Office 365 tenant. First I show you where you can get the information, where your Office 365 data is currently stored.
Open https://admin.microsoft.com and navigate to “Settings”:
The section we are looking for afterwards I have found in different locations, and I could not figure out, where the difference is coming from. If you have a option named “Organization profile”, you will find the information there, if not, you will need to open “Services & Add-Ins”. Within Services and Add-Ins in the upper section of the Site, there will be three tabs, where the last one would be the correct one. In my tenant, I do have the “Organization profile” option, from there, I can open the “View Details” of the data location option:
After the click on “View Details” on the right pane the admin portal shows you the actual data location of your Office 365 Tenant, in my case “European Union”:
Now if you are lucky, like we are in Switzerland, and Microsoft has opened a new Datacenter in your region, you can Opt-In to move your data at rest to this new location. This Option is on the same page where you can find the data location, even if you find it under “Services & Add-Ins”:
Microsoft is pointing out, that they may move your data at rest anyway to a closer datacenter later on, you can read more on this topic on this Microsoft article: Moving core data to new Office 365 datacenter geos
After a click on Opt-In, the following dialog appears on the right side of the admin center, where you are required to approve the migration:
After the approval, the admin center presents the following dialog:
Now all is done, and you need to wait for the message from Microsoft, that the services of your Office 365 tenant has moved.
While I was researching a little bit on the data residency of Office 365, I found an interesting setting for companies with locations all around the globe. Microsoft allows you to define, if user data like the Exchange mailbox or the OneDrive for Business should be stored within different data centers. You can even configure SharePoint Online sites to be stored in different datacenters. This use case can come up in case of access latency or regulatory reasons. But to be allowed to use this Multi-Geo opportunity, Microsoft requires you to have an active Enterprise Agreement with at least 500 Office 365 service subscriptions (That should not be a bummer for a multinational company in my opinion):
For more information about the geo-location of the users Office 365 data, visit this Microsoft Article:
Configure preferred data location for Office 365 resources
