Q: (from Darryl)
I am looking for a ITAR compliant hosted email solution and wanted to check with you to see if this is something your group could provide. I also need to make sure all email servers are based in the US. As a DOD contractor, we are not able to use Google Apps or most other hosted or cloud based solutions because of datacenters around the globe and security concerns.
A:
I get this question almost EVERY time I’m talking about Microsoft Cloud services and I think we have a great message to communicate to customers.
The way I’ve always answered this question is that Microsoft divides the world into three regions: North & South America, Europe & Africa, and Asia & Australia. We have an undisclosed number of datacenters in each of those regions and we select a primary datacenter within the region where the organization’s headquarters address is located.
While researching the answer to this question, I’ve subsequently learned that there are some additional rules: businesses in Brazil are hosted out of datacenters in Brazil; the secondary datacenter for US customers is ALWAYS in the US; the secondary datacenter for other regions may be in the US.
Here is the official site and detailed regional documents:
Steve