data residency

Cloud sovereignty is only as strong as the thinnest, most ambiguous stream of data that crosses a border — and for many sovereign-cloud promises that stream is metadata. The recent conversations around the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary have exposed a stubborn...

South Africa’s cloud storage market is no longer a niche play — it’s a fast-moving battleground where global hyperscalers and domestic specialists compete to solve the same core problems: data sovereignty, resilience in an energy-constrained environment, cost predictability for rand-based...

Aramco’s new memorandum of understanding with Microsoft signals a deliberate push to move industrial AI from experimental pilots into core operations — anchoring that ambition to Microsoft Azure while insisting on sovereign-ready controls, skills development, and co‑innovation that could reshape...

Microsoft’s confirmation that its Saudi Arabia East Azure datacentre region will be ready for customer workloads from Q4 2026 turns a long‑running infrastructure build into a firm operational timeline—and changes the playbook for public‑sector and enterprise cloud strategies across the Kingdom...

Multi‑Geo In‑Region Routing has moved out of preview and reached General Availability in December 2025, giving Microsoft 365 customers with Multi‑Geo deployments a long‑anticipated control point over where inbound email actually enters Exchange Online for geographically distributed users. This...

Aramco and Microsoft signed a non‑binding Memorandum of Understanding on 12 February 2026 to explore a suite of industrial artificial intelligence initiatives designed to accelerate the Kingdom’s energy‑sector digital transformation, strengthen data sovereignty, and scale a national talent...

Aramco’s non‑binding Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft signals a concrete push to move industrial artificial intelligence from pilot projects into core operations, pairing Saudi Arabia’s oil‑and‑gas titan with one of the world’s largest cloud and AI platforms to pursue sovereign‑ready...

Microsoft’s cloud footprint in the Kingdom has moved from blueprint to calendar: the company has confirmed that customers will be able to run cloud workloads from its Microsoft Azure Saudi Arabia East datacenter region beginning in Q4 2026, a development Microsoft and local partners say will...

Claude Opus 4.6 arriving in Microsoft Foundry marks a pivotal moment for enterprise AI—bringing Anthropic’s latest reasoning-focused model into a production-ready, governance-first platform that aims to let organizations move from experiments to long‑running, agentic workflows with confidence...

Microsoft used Web Summit Qatar 2026 to put a clear stake in the ground: agentic AI, governed enterprise platforms, and partner-built solutions on Microsoft Azure are the practical pathway Microsoft wants governments and large organizations in Qatar to follow — but the announcements also...

Gartner’s new forecast — that roughly 35% of countries will be tied to region‑specific AI platforms by 2027 — marks a turning point in how enterprises should think about AI: sovereignty, cultural fit, and legal alignment are now as important as raw scale and model size. Background...

France is pivoting its public‑sector collaboration away from Zoom and Microsoft Teams to a homegrown platform called Visio, a move that crystallizes a wider European push for technological sovereignty and a deliberate effort to keep public communications and data under national control...

France has announced it will replace a patchwork of U.S. video-conferencing tools used across the public sector with a domestically developed platform called Visio, and has set a target to generalize the service across all state services by 2027. Background / Overview The decision, announced...

Dynatrace’s SaaS observability platform has won formal certification from the Dubai Electronic Security Center (DESC), clearing a key regulatory hurdle for the vendor’s UAE Microsoft Azure deployment and opening the door for broader adoption across Dubai’s public sector as the emirate...

Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence platform can now run its heavy-duty data scanning and classification entirely inside a customer‑controlled Microsoft Azure tenancy, bringing a new on‑tenant deployment option — Private Scan Manager for Azure — to organisations that must keep raw content...

Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence platform can now run its heavy-duty data scanning and classification entirely inside a customer-controlled Microsoft Azure tenancy — a Private Scan Manager for Azure that promises on‑tenant raw-data scanning while maintaining a central control plane for...

Satya Nadella told Bloomberg Businessweek that DeepSeek’s R1 was the first AI model he’d seen come close to OpenAI’s performance — and Microsoft moved quickly to make R1 available in its Azure AI Foundry while stressing safety, local hosting options, and customer data protections. Background /...

GitHub Enterprise Cloud is now offering data residency in Japan, a move that finally gives Japan-based enterprises and multinational teams with Japan-facing compliance needs the option to keep their code and repository data physically within Japanese Azure regions while continuing to use...

Microsoft’s NZ North cloud region is no longer a promise on paper — a year after launch it is the backbone for several high‑profile AI and cloud projects in Aotearoa, supporting telco modernization, national telehealth, local government migrations and creative‑sector skilling while pushing...

Concentric AI’s announcement that its Semantic Intelligence platform can now run raw-data scans inside a customer‑controlled Microsoft Azure environment marks a pragmatic, if unsurprising, next step in the market’s response to the tension between SaaS convenience and strict regulatory...