Microsoft to store native Teams data in France

Microsoft is making a change to Teams users in France, as data from within the app will now be stored within the country for new account holders. The company says that the change will help regulated businesses, such as banks, schools, healthcare agencies and the government to comply with their data residency requirements.

As described in their blog post, Microsoft stores teams data, including chat logs, images, voice messages, contacts, and files in an Azure server from the user’s tenant country, with available locations being the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, India, Japan, and others. If the user resides in a country that is not yet available, Microsoft will store most of the data in one of three locations—the U.S., Europe, or the Asia-Pacific region—depending on which is closer to the datacenter.

New customers who sign up will now have the option to store their Teams data in one of two of the French Azure datacenters, either in French Central (Paris) or French South (Marseille). While the change doesn’t yet apply to new users, Microsoft says that current users will soon be able to migrate their data from the old European datacenters over to the local datacenters sometime this year.

Microsoft Teams is the latest of the Microsoft 365 apps to join the French datacenter party, as the company’s other Online services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business already use them. Microsoft says it’s working on making all Office 365 files stored locally in all of the correct countries, with the United Arab Emirates and South Africa (both of which also store data in Europe) coming soon.