Microsoft was taken to court after it declined the US Government’s request to access the data held on a Microsoft server in Dublin.
The general manager for national cloud programmes at Microsoft, Doug Hauger has spoken out against the US Government, who is currently engaged in a legal battle with Microsoft.
Hauger said that customers expect a company such as Microsoft to be transparent about their policies on keeping their data secure.
“We are very clear that if we receive a request from a law enforcement agency for your data, we will redirect that request to you and, where we are allowed to, we will reveal to you that we have been asked to provide access to your data.”
Until late 2015, U.S. based companies such as Facebook and Microsoft, which have several million users across the EU, were allowed to store european users’ data on U.S. based servers.
However, a ruling in 2015 changed the EU’s policy on data residency, which now requires the data on European users to be stored in servers based in the EU.
Microsoft has been influential in keeping the privacy and security of its users at highest priority. As the Redmond based company works on constructing two new Microsoft data centers in Germany and the UK, it continues to publicly fight the US Government, who attempts to access the data of users outside the United States.
Source: ComputerWeekly
