Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Microsoft is again banging the data sovereignty drum in Europe, months after admitting in a French court it couldn't guarantee that data will not be transmitted to the US government when it is legally required to do so.

Under the CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel access to information held by American cloud providers irrespective of where in the world that data is housed. Although Microsoft says it has published transparency reports and no European customers, private or public, were yet the subject of any requests, the threat of the law remains and this is making some nervous.

Since President Donald Trump came to power for a second time in January, Microsoft has itself admitted that geopolitical relations between the US and Europe have become volatile, and it has sought to calm jittery customers by outlining measures to harden data sovereignty.

Google has also adopted this strategy, and AWS ...