[German]Microsoft started to offer Microsoft 365 Local to customers who operate an Azure Local infrastructure. This is a scenario in which the Office 365 apps run on the local Azure structure. It's a strategy to hold up the move to digital sovereignty in Europe.
I received the information via distinct reader notes and the following Post in a German Facebook administrator group.
According to Microsoft's German press release, Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, presented a sovereignty update for Germany during his Microsoft AI promotion tour in Munich. The press release named two products:
- Azure Local Disconnected: Enables customers to operate business-critical infrastructures in a completely decoupled manner. This allows Azure governance and policy controls to be used even without a cloud connection. The aim is to ensure continuity and resilience in sovereign, classified, or isolated environments.
- Microsoft 365 Local Disconnected: Microsoft 365 is now also available to customers without a cloud connection. Central collaboration tools such as Exchange Server, SharePoint, or Skype for Business Server can be operated entirely in the customer's sovereign environment. Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Copilot from an M365 package can thus be operated locally without a cloud connection.
Microsoft has explained the whole concept for M365 in more detail in the article What is Microsoft 365 Local? According to this article, Microsoft 365 Local was developed for companies that need productivity tools in a private cloud environment. The whole thing is based on Azure-compliant management with a unified control layer. According to Microsoft, the solution includes a validated reference architecture with certified hardware, as well as a hardened security foundation and robust controls to protect your infrastructure.
Microsoft 365 Local promises to simplify the deployment of this solution and optimize updates for easy infrastructure management. According to the support article, it supports both hybrid and fully separate deployments. According to Microsoft, companies choose Microsoft 365 Local for several important reasons:
- To leverage cloud management in their own data center and implement a sovereign private cloud with Azure-compliant management.
- To choose between seamless integration with cloud services or a fully separate environment, depending on sovereignty requirements.
- To keep sensitive workloads and data entirely on-premises in order to comply with legal and sovereignty-related regulations.
This is understood as "promoting digital sovereignty", one could interpret this as Microsoft seeing its chances slip away due to current political developments in Europe. However, the above solution will only be available to large customers.
