A growing number of tech giants and cloud providers offer European data residency programs along the lines of the EU Data Boundary. These help customers comply with European local privacy and data protection laws like the GDPR, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act, and the U.K.’s data protection legislation. Data residency refers to the physical location of an organization’s data, as well as the local laws and policy requirements imposed on that data.
According to Microsoft, for cloud services supported by the EU Data Boundary, customer data and “pseudonymized” personal data are stored and processed in datacenters located in countries within the EU or EFTA. “Professional services data,” which includes data that’s provided to Microsoft, like certain log data, is stored at rest.