The aim is to help M365 Copilot customers, particularly those in government and highly regulated industries, meet “governance, security and regulatory compliance demands,” Paul Lorimer, Microsoft corporate vice president, Office 365 Enterprise and Cloud Engineering, said in a blog post Tuesday.
“With in-country processing, Copilot interactions are processed, under normal operations, in data centers located within a nation’s borders, giving customers greater control over their data,” said Lorimer. Local processing can also improve the genAI assistant’s performance by reducing latency, he said.
Amid rising geopolitical tension, customers in some regions want their data — and the processing of that data — confined to “specific regional, if not local, data centers,” said Nader Henein, research vice president analyst at Gartner. “This is meant as an additional level of regulatory protection where data stored locally is governed by local laws and further insulated from extra-territorial reach.”
