Microsoft reiterates trusted cloud policies: “your data belongs to you”

With all the recent talk about encryption and personal data, Microsoft looks to remind its customers that all of their data is safe. Microsoft has safeguards in place to protect both personal and enterprise customers’ data with its Azure Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) Computing Services.

Here’s a short video of some of the things Microsoft is doing to keep their customers’ data safe in the cloud:

Here are the finer points of Microsoft’s Trusted Cloud principles and their commitment to customers’ data, privacy, and customer control options of their data:

• You own your data, not us. When you use a Microsoft cloud service, you keep the ability to take your data with you when you terminate an agreement. When a subscription expires or you terminate your contract, Microsoft follows a 90-day retention policy and strict standards for overwriting storage before reuse.

• Your data is not used for marketing. Our enterprise business model is not based on exploiting customer data. We do not use your data for purposes such as advertising that are unrelated to providing the cloud service.

• We don’t use standing access. Only a small set of activities require human involvement; access to your data by Microsoft personnel is granted only when necessary for support or operations, then revoked when no longer needed.

• You can choose your datacenter location. Depending on which cloud services you have, you may have flexibility in choosing where your data physically resides. Your data may be replicated for redundancy within the geographic area, but not transmitted outside it.

• We protect data from government surveillance. Over several years, we’ve expanded encryption across all our services and reinforced legal protections for customer data. And we’ve enhanced transparency so that you can be assured that we do not build “back doors” into our products and services, nor do we provide any government with direct or unfettered access to customer data.

• Law enforcement requests must go through you. We will not disclose your data to a third party except as you direct or as required by law. We’ll attempt to redirect third parties to request customer data directly from the data owner.

For a closer look at what specific security measures are in place to protect your data, check out Microsoft’s Trust Center.