Microsoft Teams will provide data residency for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) starting November 1, 2019. This means that all new Microsoft Teams customers in the UAE will have data for conversations and chat stored at rest in the UAE. New customers are the Office 365 tenants that are provisioned after the date of launch stated above or customers who have not yet used the Teams service prior to the date of launch.
Teams data residency in the UAE, as well as our other Office 365 data residency commitments in the data-centers located in the UAE, help regulated organizations – such as banking, public sector, government, and healthcare, – onboard to Teams and Office 365 while complying with their data residency requirements.
Where your Teams data is stored
Your Teams data 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 a customer provisions its tenant in Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, India, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates or the United States (US), 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.
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:
Please note that customers that allow users to store files with a third-party storage provider are dependent on the storage location of those services and should, therefore, review the location of data at rest for those services separately.
We will continue to roll out Microsoft Teams to more local datacenters aligned with the Office 365 data residency strategy.
FAQ
Which workloads inside Teams provide data residency in the United Arab Emirates?
Exchange Online and SharePoint Online provide data residency in the United Arab Emirates. Please see the datacenter maps for more information about the location of data at rest for more Office 365 services and for all our geos in the world.
Where exactly in the United Arab Emirates is this data stored?
Teams chat and media data will be stored in the UAE Central and UAE North Azure datacenters located in Abu Dhabi and Dubai respectively.
What does this mean for new customers in the United Arab Emirates?
From November 4, 2019 (“Launch Date”), customers from the United Arab Emirates 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 data residency in the UAE.
What does this mean for existing customers in the United Arab Emirates?
Customers who are already using Teams will continue to have data residency for their content stored at rest in the EMEA location.
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 the UAE affects your timelines to deploy. Based on your requirements, they will recommend the best approach for you.
Thanks again for your time in reading this and for all the support you’ve shown towards Microsoft Teams.
Ken Hardy
Principal PM Manager, Microsoft Teams
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