It depends on who you are and who you deal with. We house a lot of our stuff in Azure, but we entered into an agreement with an European based Microsoft child company.
If the us wants access to our data, they’ll need to go through the Danish courts.
We spend a lot of money though, but it afford us our own private servers in the Irish farm, that we have physical access to and our data never enters the public part of Azure.
If the US government wants to get access, it probably can, after a few months in various EU courts, but all they’ll find by the in our little vault will be a tape recorder playing twister sisters - we’re not gonna take it on repeat.
Of course American companies will be replaced by an European competitor if the US government doesn’t wise up and stops being dicks. If there was a real alternative to American clouds we’d have left by now.
Is that still valid even though the European company is controlled by Microsoft? As I understand, the agreement they have in Germany basically hands over all control to Telekom, basically like a franchise model. As long as Microsoft Europe still controls access to the data, can't they be forced by Microsoft US to reveal the data? As I understood, that was the reason why OVH hesitated for so long to build US data centres and then used a separate company for it (not sure if they went through with that plan).
Not a lawyer so pure speculation but would be interested if anyone has details.
As far as I know we’re perfectly safe within the setup we run. I haven’t been involved in the legal bits beyond asking for permission to put citizen data in the cloud and being granted permission by our government and the EU.
Maybe this verdict changes things, but if it did, I’m fairly confident that I would’ve known by now considering it’s a sensitive issue.
We do have extensive exit plans at hand, for such an event. Plans that are really just us burning money because the US surveillance state can’t get it’s damn act together.
Microsoft German datacenters are unaffected yeah. They're not connected in any way to the upstream MS Azure network, the only way for MS to control them would be through an infected security update, which they'll never do.
If the us wants access to our data, they’ll need to go through the Danish courts.
We spend a lot of money though, but it afford us our own private servers in the Irish farm, that we have physical access to and our data never enters the public part of Azure.
If the US government wants to get access, it probably can, after a few months in various EU courts, but all they’ll find by the in our little vault will be a tape recorder playing twister sisters - we’re not gonna take it on repeat.
Of course American companies will be replaced by an European competitor if the US government doesn’t wise up and stops being dicks. If there was a real alternative to American clouds we’d have left by now.