Today’s business scenario is such that most enterprises prefer to store data within regional boundaries.
The multinational companies have offices across the world. These companies need to store employee data in specific regions to meet data residency needs. Using Multi-Geo capabilities, you can help the multinational customers address regional and industry specific needs.
General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR needs businesses to undertake measures in protecting consumer privacy. Inability to store data in a given region can hamper expansion plans for business, since in that case, businesses are unable to distribute workforce across countries or regions especially when they require centralisation of business data.
Enterprises of today use local datacenter on premises or hybrid architectures to solve this issue.
Though these solutions are widely used, they come with a few drawbacks and Microsoft 365 Business Multi-Geo capabilities offer a solution to solve such concerns.
How Can Multi-Geo Capabilities Help?
Multi-Geo in Microsoft 365 or Office 365 allows to unify control of SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange data through a single tenant.
In this case, organisations can point out the location where it wants to store each users’ content.
A global tenant is used by the whole organisation in this case. Thus, all users can access data regardless of location. Businesses can create a tenant in the home datacenter region and then keep adding satellite regions while they expand.
Basic Concepts of Multi-Geo
In Multi-Geo configuration, Microsoft 365 tenant includes a central location apart from a few satellite locations.
Let us go through some key terms to understand basics of the configuration.
Tenant: Representation of the organisation in Microsoft 365. It may have one or more domains associated with it.
Geo Location: Geographic locations that hosts the data in Microsoft 365 tenant.
Satellite Locations: Additional locations configured to host data.
Preferred Data Location: Geo location where the user’s OneDrive and Exchange data are stored. The administrator can set this to any geo-location configured for the tenant.
Getting Onboarded to Multi-Geo
Getting onboarded is a simple process and uses only a few familiar tools like Powershell and Azure Active Directory Connect. Businesses can use these tools for enabling Multi-Geo and then assign geo to the users.
Well, do not worry about user experience.
Multi-Geo does not affect the end-user experience. The users can keep accessing their emails and OneDrive files.
Multi-Geo Capabilities Advantages
Multi-Geo capabilities help businesses with data residency needs. Let us check out on the advantages it offers to users.
- All users enjoy similar user experience when it comes to facilities, like scheduling meetings, file sharing, mobile access or search experience.
- Performance consistency remains guaranteed across the world with the service level agreements of Microsoft.
- Set up and management of Multi-Geo experience is simpler than the hybrid or on-premises setups.
- Satellite Geo for OneDrive and SharePoint gets their own URL but Exchange does not need separate namespace.
- The comprehensive reporting dashboard provides all necessary details to administrators.
As users enjoy the same experience regardless of location, the administrators can manage the workforce with ease.
