Providing Trusted Open Cloud
This blog post is the second in a series of five blog posts highlighting various aspects of Microsoft’s open source strategy.
As covered in the first post in this series, Microsoft has taken an open approach to cloud, and is applying a set of principles to empower customers by enabling choice.
And why are we making this effort? To provide you with the most trusted cloud environment. Today, Microsoft supports more than 200 online and cloud services, a billion customers, and 20 million businesses in more than 76 markets worldwide. We know that our customers want to use technology they trust. Establishing trust with customers starts with addressing four fundamental areas: security, privacy, control and transparency:
Secure cloud
We commit to a secure cloud. Microsoft has very stringent certifications for security. Our datacenters are equipped with state-of-the-art physical security measures. We operate a 24x7 incident response team to mitigate threats and attacks and encrypt data between you and our datacenters. We also protect your stored data with built-in tools and provide access to further encryption capabilities. Being secure, however, isn’t enough by itself; privacy is also critical.
Protecting privacy
Privacy is all about you being in control of who can see and access your data and under which terms and conditions. And more importantly, you should always have access to your content, and should be able to delete it or take it with you if you leave. Microsoft allows you to keep your data in your region, and in some cases inside your country and we will not use your data for advertising or commercial purposes. Microsoft is the only hyper scale cloud vendor that meets the highest standards and certifications for privacy in the industry today, and we were the first major cloud provider to adopt the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy, ISO/IEC 27018 in February of 2015. By default, no one at Microsoft has access to any customer data, and if access is required for administration purposes, that access is temporary granted and it is recorded in a log that customers have constant access.
It is critical that customers have Control of their data at all times. As a hyper scale vendor, Microsoft has datacenters at many regions of the world and therefore operates in many legal jurisdictions which have different laws regarding data sovereignty and privacy. To manage this complexity, Microsoft gives customers the tools to choose which datacenters they want to use to store their data so that they remain in total control of their privacy.
Acting transparently
The last tenant of our trusted cloud environment is Transparency. We publish detailed information about our processes and our practices so customers can monitor how we manage their data and who has accessed it. The Microsoft Law Enforcement Request report is one of the ways in which we provide transparency about requests for customer data from governments around the world. We are also dedicated to complying with every region’s cloud certifications, like FISMA or HIPAA or any other region or industry certification, and we will make sure that our datacenters meet the standards.
By being transparent, giving customers the tools to manage their privacy, and implementing strict security policies, we believe that we provide the most Trusted Cloud that is superior to our competitors.
To summarize, our Open Approach is about adhering to some key principles that empower our customers. We deliver that by providing a wide range of choices in a cross platform and interoperable way with open standards, resulting in the most trusted cloud.
About the writer: Pasi Mäkinen, Open Source Lead, Microsoft Western Europe, is working with customers and partners to drive open source based workloads on Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Contact at pasi.makinen@microsoft.com or follow at Twitter @pasimak. Check the rest of the Openness story at: https://microsoft.com/openness. Find fresh and upcoming webinars on Open Source and Azure here: https://info.microsoft.com/WE-OSSonAzure.html.
To read the first blog post in this series, please click the link: