Multinational companies that have offices around the world often have needs to store their employee data at-rest in specific regions to meet their data residency requirements. Today, at Microsoft Ignite, we're announcing Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, a new feature that helps multinational customers address their regional, industry specific or organizational data residency requirements in Office 365.
Multi-Geo enables a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple Office 365 datacenter geographies (geos), and gives customers the ability to store their Exchange and OneDrive data, at-rest, on a per-user basis, in their chosen geos.
Available geos in Multi-Geo
For example, Contoso Inc., a multinational corporation with its headquarters in the United States and branches in the European Union and Australia can move from managing many regional on-premises Exchange and SharePoint servers to a single Multi-Geo enabled Office 365 tenant for their entire company. They can set up the Home geo in the United States, and Satellite geos in the European Union and Australia, and choose to store each employee’s data at-rest in one of the chosen geos and meet their global data residency needs.
Moving from multiple on-premises servers into a single Multi-Geo enabled Office 365 tenant brings globally dispersed employees together and enables a modern collaboration experience across the company. Organizational content is no longer subject to the discovery and collaboration barriers that are created by on-premises silos. For example, searching in SharePoint presents aggregated search results regardless of in which geo the content is located. Another example is with Delve surfacing relevant documents, presentations and other content for all users regardless of in which geo location the content resides. And as always, users can view and access the content only if they have the right level of permissions to do so.
Onboarding onto Multi-Geo is a straightforward process using familiar tools such as Azure Active Directory Connect and PowerShell. Customers can use these tools to enable Multi-Geo in their tenant and assign geos to their users. Multi-Geo also does not impact the end user experience; users can continue to access their email and OneDrive files while their data is being moved between geos.
We’re currently previewing Multi-Geo Capabilities in Exchange Online and OneDrive. We plan to make Multi-Geo generally available for Exchange Online and OneDrive in the first half of calendar year 2018. We’re planning a SharePoint preview in 2018, as well.
To learn about the Multi-Geo preview and request your nomination, please contact your Microsoft account team.
What would be interesting is being able to push out to in country data centre providers where there are no azure dcs and a requirement for on country data storage.
As OneDrive essentially is a SharePoint site collection, does this imply the SharePoint site collections are created (by an admin) at a certain multigeo url, and hence everything in that site collection is stored in that geo location? In other words, is the granularity of SharePoint elements to be multigeo actually the site collection level? It is a bit confusing as some materials mention 'sites' instead of 'site collections', but that's quite a difference!
@Edward Bogaard Correct, in the context of SharePoint and OneDrive, site = site collection in this conversation. Once a users preferred data location (PDL) is set by the administrator, that users destination for OneDrive for Business follows the PDL as OneDrive is a user resource, for shared resources such as SharePoint, the site (site collection) is created in the selected geo as specified by the administrator and is accessible to users of all geos if so allowed by the administrator of the site.
@Deepak Badki - There will be a PS cmdlet to move sites between the primary geo and satellite geos. We're working through the cost/licensing requirements for Multi-Geo and will have an update shortly.
@vivek bharatia - The Office 365 edge (service front doors) are already distributed and users will automatically connect to nearest entry point into the Microsoft network. Please see details at https://aka.ms/Office365Networking
@Sankarasubramanian Parameswaran - you can use the Get-Mailbox cmdlet to figure out the name of the Mailbox Region. The cmdlet is: get-mailbox demouser | FT Name, Database, MailboxRegion
@Jason Levandoski - Thanks for your interest. Please connect with your Microsoft account team rep to nominate your customer into the Multi-Geo preview.
@Mike Platvoet For a multi-national enabled Tenant you can use the Get-MsolCompanyAllowedDataLocation cmdlet which gets all the current allowed data locations of a company from Azure Active Directory.
Ex.
Regional codes for allowed data location (ADL) Regional mapping APC = Asia Pacific, India AUS = Australia CAN = Canada EUR = Europe, Middle East, Africa JPN = Japan NAM = North America
@Nancy Huynh - Reporting will be available to show where each user's data is stored at rest. For OneDrive, the file location can also be determined from the URL as each geo will have a unique URL namespace.
@Adnan Rafique - Document sharing is based on link sharing. i.e. if the document is only shared with specific users in a geo, then it won't appear for users across other geos.
Outgoing mail routing is from the geo of the user, incoming mail gets EOP scanned in the Central geo (home) of the tenant
Microsoft is investigating Multi-Geo in other services; as of now Exchange Online and OneDrive are being worked on.
Multi-Geo is great news but this is 7 months later. Do we have a go live date yet? When will this offered to customers and when will it be offered to CSP? -Thanks!
Hi @Sam Paakki - Multi-Geo is not a tenant-to-tenant migration solution. It allows customers to add Satellite Geos to an existing Office 365 tenant and then store user data for Exchange and OneDrive in desired Satellite Geos.
Is it possible to configure a Multi-Geo tenant such that documents classified using AIP are restricted for access only from user accounts associated with the Geo in which the document is stored? For example, if a document is assigned to the Korea Geo, then only users within the Korea Geo can access that file?
Can that limitation be enabled for documents with a certain classification, and then other documents with different classifications CAN be accessed from other Geos?
Will it ever be released for tenancies with less than 5000 licenses? I know many multinationals that would like to patriciate but do not have 5000 seats
Great news about the Geo options for Exchange online.
I want to test this function without enabling this on my live production tenant and so my question here is can I get Geo Exchange online enabled in a test tenant or does it need to be an actual live tenant due to the user limitation?
Here's another question, Multi Geo if requires say 5k users to be licensed, what if say i upgrade to 5k users and then enable the option because now I have the option and I provision a few users in Multi Geo's only then to reduce my license needs say a month later so I fall back below 5k users I would expect Mutl Geo to remain active since mailboxes are now provisioned in Multi Geo locations. What's the official line MS?
Hi all, thanks for the feedback on the licensing requirements for Multi-Geo. The minimum seats requirement has been lowered to 2,500 Office 365 seats. Please contact your Microsoft representative for details. We're working on bringing the seat limits down even further, please stay tuned.
Hi @leslie hill, You would be billed on a base 5% of your Office 365 tenant, which if has 2,500 users would mean that a minimum of 125 users will need to be licensed for Multi-Geo. So if you lower your seat count below 2,500, then you may still be billed for the minimum 125 users. Please connect with your Microsoft representative for details.