February 2, 2020 – Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Technical Journal

If you are a existing Office 365 customer who have been waiting Microsoft to allow you to move your Teams data location, It’s now time to do it.

Office 365 now allows you to decide where your Teams data residency should be. We have noticed that most of our clients got their Data residency set to Australia as the data region.

Microsoft now offer existing O365 customers listed in the following table an option to request early migration of organization’s core customer data at rest to their new datacenter geo.

Changing the geo location is completely taken care by Microsoft behind the scene. You as a customer, only have to opt-in to allow Microsoft to do this in the backend (despite your request, this will anyway happen eventually) and the change is seamless with no user interaction, interruption.

To see your current data location for each workload, go to Office 365 Admin center –> Settings –> Settings –> Organization Profile

Navigate to Data Location to see where your data currently resides

Switch to Data Residency and “check the tick box” below to opt-in. You will not see this option if:

Your tenant is not eligible for the Office 365 Move Program. Eligibility is determined by tenant signup country.
All of your core customer data at rest is already located in the new geo (see Data Location section of the page).

And wait for a few months as advised in the notification. Microsoft will notify you stage-wise in the Office 365 Message center when the activity is being actioned or completed.