Azure OpenAI - Regional Data Use

Question

When I use an Azure service in an Australian region, can I be guaranteed that the data never leaves that region? Is there an article / ToS I can see with this info?

I'm particularly interested in AI services, including Azure OpenAI, Document Intelligence, Vision, and Face.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Casey Clifton Greetings & Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum!

When I use an Azure service in an Australian region, can I be guaranteed that the data never leaves that region? Is there an article / ToS I can see with this info?

Azure OpenAI endpoints are regional, and data is stored in the same region as the endpoint. For more information, see the Azure data residency documentation.

Microsoft takes data privacy and security very seriously, and has implemented measures to ensure that personally identifiable information (PII) is not shared with OpenAI during the usage of Azure OpenAI Service. The same has been mentioned in the FAQs as well.

Your prompts (inputs) and completions (outputs), your embeddings, and your training data:

• are NOT available to other customers.
• are NOT available to OpenAI.
• are NOT used to improve OpenAI models.
• are NOT used to improve any Microsoft or 3rd party products or services.
• are NOT used for automatically improving Azure OpenAI models for your use in your resource (The models are stateless, unless you explicitly fine-tune models with your training data).
• Your fine-tuned Azure OpenAI models are available exclusively for your use.

The Azure OpenAI Service is fully controlled by Microsoft; Microsoft hosts the OpenAI models in Microsoft’s Azure environment and the Service does NOT interact with any services operated by OpenAI (e.g. ChatGPT, or the OpenAI API).

For more information, see the Azure OpenAI data, privacy, and security guide.

When you use Azure OpenAI Service, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and is stored in Microsoft Azure data centers that are compliant with various industry standards and regulations, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR. Microsoft also provides tools and services to help you manage and protect your data, such as Azure Key Vault and Azure Active Directory. See Azure OpenAI Service encryption of data at rest for more details.

Also, Azure OpenAI Service on your data empowers you to unlock the full potential of your data by running OpenAI models directly on it, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning.

Please check Azure OpenAI on your data for more information.

You can also find more information about Microsoft's data privacy and security policies on the Microsoft Trust Center.

I'm particularly interested in AI services, including Azure OpenAI, Document Intelligence, Vision, and Face.

Please assure that your data is not leaked or shared as mentioned above.

You can check below documentations for more clarity.

Data, privacy, and security for Document Intelligence

Data and privacy for Face and Data and privacy for Image Analysis

Microsoft Products and Services Data Protection Addendum (DPA)

Hope this helps. Do let me know if you have any further queries.

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Answer 2

Hi @Casey Clifton

When you use Azure services in an Australian region, the data processed by these services is generally kept within the same region. Now, specifically for the AI services you mentioned:

Azure OpenAI: The incoming data is processed in the same region where the Azure OpenAI resource was created. Prompts and responses are processed within the customer-specified geography but may be processed between regions within the geography for operational purposes (including performance and capacity management). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/openai/data-privacy

Document Intelligence: Similar to Azure OpenAI, the incoming data is processed in the same region where the Document Intelligence resource was created. The input data and results are deleted within 24 hours and not used for other purposes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/cognitive-services/document-intelligence/data-privacy-security

I could not find any specific information for Azure Vision and Face.

If you find this response helpful and it resolves your issue, please consider marking it as “Accepted” or giving it an upvote. This will help others in the community find the solution more easily.