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Microsoft Teams launches South Korea Data Residency

Varun Sagar's avatar
Varun Sagar
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Aug 05, 2019

Microsoft Teams will provide customer data residency for South Korea customers starting July 9th, 2019.

 

Beginning on this date, all new Teams customers in South Korea (e.g., new tenants, or first use of Teams) will be served out of the South Korea data center. For these new customers, files uploaded to a Teams channel will be stored in SharePoint Online, and files uploaded through 1:1 chat will be stored in OneDrive for Business in-country for all new customers. For existing customers, customer data in Teams continues to be stored in its current location.

 

Teams customer data residency in South Korea, as well as our other Office 365 customer data residency commitments in the data centers located in South Korea, help organizations with data residency requirements to onboard to Teams and Office 365.

 

This rollout furthers the in-country data residency capabilities of Microsoft Teams. As of this release, the Microsoft Teams services described above store data at rest in the following locations:

• NEW! South Korea data centers in Seoul and Busan
• France datacenters in Marseille and Paris
• Australia: datacenters in New South Wales and Victoria
• Japan: datacenters in Tokyo (Saitama) and Osaka
• APAC [Asia Pacific]: datacenters in Singapore and Hong Kong
• EMEA [Europe, Middle East, and Africa]: datacenters in Dublin & Amsterdam
• AMER [Americas – North, and South]: datacenters in Bay, CA and Boydton, VA
• UK: datacenters in Cardiff and London
• India: datacenters in Chennai and Pune
• Canada datacenters in Quebec City and Toronto
• South Africa datacenters in Cape Town and Johannesburg

 

Where your Teams data is stored
The data you provide through your use of Teams is stored differently depending on the content type. Please watch the Ignite Breakout session on Microsoft Teams architecture for an in-depth discussion.

Core Teams customer data: If an organization provisions its tenant in Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, India, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, the United Kingdom, or the United States, Microsoft will store the following customer data at rest only within that location: (1) Microsoft Teams chats, team and channel conversations, images, voicemail messages, and contacts, (2) SharePoint Online site content and the files stored within that site, and (3) files uploaded to OneDrive for Business. Below is additional information on which Microsoft platforms and applications store Teams data.


•  Chat, channel messages, team structure: Every team in Microsoft Teams is backed by an Office 365 group and its SharePoint Online site and Exchange Online mailbox. Private chats (including group chats), messages sent as part of a conversation in a channel, and the structure of teams and channels are stored in a chat service running in Azure. The data is also stored in a hidden folder in the user and group mailboxes to enable Information Protection features.

•  Voicemail and Contacts: Voicemails are stored in Exchange Online. Contacts are stored in an Exchange Online-based cloud data store. Exchange Online and the Exchange Online-based cloud store already provide customer data residency in each of the worldwide datacenter geos. For all Teams, customers voicemail and contacts are stored in-country for Australia, Canada, France, India, Japan, UK, South Korea, South Africa, and the US. For all other countries, files are stored in the US, Europe, or Asia-Pacific location based on tenant affinity.

  Images and Media: Media used in chats is stored in an Azure-based media service that is deployed to the same locations as the chat service. (One exception is Giphy GIFs which are not stored, but are reference links to the original Giphy service URLs; Giphy is a non-Microsoft service)

  Files: Files (including OneNote and wiki) that somebody shares in a channel are stored in the team’s SharePoint Online site. Files shared in a private chat or a chat during a meeting or call are uploaded and stored in the OneDrive for Business account of the user who shares the file. Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business already provide customer data residency in each of the worldwide datacenter geos. So, for existing customers, all files, OneNote notebooks, Teams wiki content, and mailboxes that are part of the Teams experience are already stored in the location based on your tenant affinity. Files are stored in-country for Australia, Canada, France, India, Japan, UK, and South Korea. For all other countries, files are stored in the US, Europe, or Asia Pacific location based on tenant affinity.

 

Please note that customers that allow users to store files with a third-party storage provider are dependent on the third-party's choice of storage location of those services and should, therefore, review the location of data at rest for those services separately. Some uses of third-party storage include:
1. Tabs: Tabs allow users to pin information from apps and services to a channel. Thus, it varies by type of the tab where the data is stored. The tab itself does not store any data within Teams. For example, a SharePoint Online tab will store data based on where the SharePoint Online site collection was provisioned. A tab that includes information from a partner will store the data directly in the system used by the partner and only present a view of it in Teams.

2. Other partner apps: Microsoft does not provide any data residency support for apps and services from partners that you might be using within the Microsoft Teams experience. Please review information from those solutions directly to learn about where their data is being stored.
We will continue to roll out Microsoft Teams to more local datacenters aligned with the Office 365 customer data residency strategy.

FAQ
Which workloads in addition to Teams provide data residency in South Korea?
Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business also provide customer data residency in South Korea.



Where exactly in South Korea is this data stored?
Teams chat and media data will be stored in the Korea Central and Korea South datacenters located in Seoul and Busan respectively.

What does this mean for new customers in South Korea?
From July 9th, 2019 (“Launch Date”), customers from South Korea who have never previously logged into Microsoft Teams (i.e. no user in their tenant has ever accessed teams.microsoft.com or signed into any Teams client app) will have customer data residency in South Korea.

What does this mean for existing customers in South Korea?
Customers who are already using Teams will continue to have data residency for their content stored at rest in the APAC location. Soon, Microsoft will provide a migration feature to enable data migration for these existing Teams customers. We do not have a specific date at this point.

 

If I have more questions, who should I talk to?
Please do not hesitate to contact your Account Team or FastTrack if you have more questions about Teams deployments and how the availability of data residency in South Korea affects your timelines to deploy. Based on your requirements, they will recommend the best approach for you.

What is the roadmap for data residency in other countries?
Our goal is to provide data residency for Teams in all the Office 365 country-based datacenters.

Thanks again for your time in reading this, and for all the support you’ve shown towards Microsoft Teams.

Varun Sagar
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Teams

Updated Jan 26, 2021
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