You may have read my not-terribly-polite post about the astonishing restrictions found inside Microsoft’s terms and conditions for its hosted services. Well here’s the follow-up.

Because yesterday, I (and a couple of colleagues) had an hour-long “full and frank exchange of views” with four senior Microsoft Redmond people responsible for the hosted services offering: Eron Kelly, Senior Director, Microsoft Online Services; Kore Kourbourlis, Senior Director, Compliance and Privacy; Brendon Lynch, Director, Trustworthy Computing; and Mike Ziock, Senior Director of Operations, Business Online Services.

We went through our concerns regarding data movement, implications for data protection issues under EU law, SLA, the sign-up process, terms & conditions and so forth.

The discussion was productive and Microsoft, you may be surprised to hear, thanked us for raising these issues.

There is one update of particular importance – Mike Ziock, who runs the operations side of the hosted services, stated that your data is held in Dublin (in a redundant failover fashion) and is backed up to Amsterdam. And that under no circumstances would it leave the EU.

There is a concern surrounding the routing of email through the Microsoft cloud which means that it might traverse through Microsoft’s datacenters before passing into the normal internet in the USA (for example) but it was agreed that mail routing and spam filtering was accepted as a necessary part of information flow, and was not to be confused with the bigger and much more important issue of the geolocalition of core company data.

We asked when we would see an updated set of Terms & Conditions which reflected these new claims. They were not able to give a solid timeline for this.

So despite the assurances given yesterday, our concerns regarding data movement etc still stand – Microsoft needs to do much work to clarify and simplify the T&Cs such that they are both relevant to the UK/EU marketplace and are binding here.

It would be very disappointing if MS did nothing until the next wave of technology hosting, which will be the public release of Azure cloud services later in the year. As it stands, we have sets of T&Cs and other documentation which are simply contradictory in what they state, and this is not acceptable.

Obviously I will update as soon as we hear something concrete and binding from Microsoft, but for now the message is clear: improving, listening too, but must try harder.