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The truth about Microsoft Azure - and where your data will be kept

Posted on 10 Aug 2009 at 19:17

Jon Honeyball gets stuck into the thorny matter of the service level agreements promised by Microsoft's Azure, and exactly where your data will end up

So I asked them why Microsoft gives a full SLA refund only at the 95% level, which represents nearly four-and-a-half days of downtime per month, given a nine-to-five working day. Their answer was that Microsoft’s actual uptime is vastly better than this level, but I didn’t get far when I suggested that if that’s the case then they should increase the SLA level to match the claimed internal uptime...

So where is the data kept?

No matter, the most important and interesting comment came from Mike Ziock, who actually runs the infrastructure of this service, when he made it very clear that data that was provisioned into Dublin or Amsterdam would never leave the EU – it would never be failed-over into Oregon or Singapore.

I asked for written confirmation of this, and that it be written into the Terms and Conditions for EU customers, and he said they’d look into that. When asked for a timescale for new Terms and Conditions, they wouldn’t commit.

So where does this leave us? Microsoft’s representatives say that data won’t ever leave the EU, but there’s nothing in writing to actually make this promise concrete and legally binding. The documentation and sign-up process is still an embarrassing mess of web pages that take you on a trip halfway around the internet and back, so that you have no idea whether what you’re reading actually applies to you or not. And frankly, there are still far too many weasel-words scattered around these documents for me to be happy.

I look forward to seeing fully revised and reconsidered contracts and documentation for this service, and until that happens my worries won’t go away, and that no amount of “Oh no, we didn’t mean THAT, we meant THIS” will be good enough to allay them.

I’d like to truly believe that this has just been the result of a grand cock-up, that senior Microsoft managers didn’t properly think things through, and that time and circumstances got the better of them. That would be preferable to believing that Microsoft is merely a large-but-tin-pot North American company that couldn’t spell “world class service” if its life depended on it.

Or worse still, that it doesn’t give a damn about international customers, and rolls out stuff that’s alright for Des Moines, Iowa, which is about as far as its world-view and due diligence can stretch. Or worst of all, that lawyers and accountants run Microsoft nowadays, and that the risks they seek to mitigate and the financial exposures they wish to minimise are their own, rather than those of their customers.

All I’ll say is this hasn’t been a pleasant experience, and that now my own trial period on hosted Exchange Server has come to an end, I will not be signing up to the full server deal.