Azure Local can now run fully disconnected with no cloud connectivity, Microsoft confirmed at the London leg of its AI tour.
The latest change comes amid heightened trade and geopolitical tensions between the US administration and Europe, with more customers in the trading bloc seeking reassurances about digital sovereignty.
Like rival US hyperscalers, Microsoft has rolled out initiatives in Europe in a bid to address jittery locals worried about the possibility – no matter how remote – of service interruption or their data being accessed by American officials under the US CLOUD Act.
In March, Microsoft completed its EU Data Boundary service, then added more features in November. Yet for a growing number of organizations in Europe, only infrastructure under their direct control will do.
Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) is Microsoft’s answer to those concerns. Using specialized hardware, Azure Local lets customers run workloads on-premises. However, it still needed to phone home occasionally – its management via Azure Arc ran in the cloud, and pulling the plug for more than 30 days resulted in reduced functionality.
By making disconnected operations available in Azure Local, organizations can “now run mission-critical infrastructure with Azure governance and policy control, with no cloud connectivity, optimizing continuity for sovereign, classified or isolated environments,” Microsoft said this week.
In other words, no more calling back to the mothership.
Microsoft has also made Microsoft 365 Local available (think Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server) and announced Foundry Local (only available to “qualified customers”).
“This brings the richness of Microsoft’s enterprise AI capabilities to on-premises systems, complete with local inferencing and APIs that operate completely within customer-controlled data boundaries,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft’s sovereignty claims may ring hollow for some after it admitted in France last year that it could not guarantee sovereignty if it were compelled to hand data to the US government. The ability to completely pull the plug is therefore intended to reassure customers, even if the software remains proprietary and supplied by a US tech giant.
[…]
“Sovereignty is increasingly a requirement, and we welcome any new services, tools, and software that can run in European Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers’ datacenters and on their own platforms. We look forward to testing these products against our forthcoming CISPE Sovereign Cloud Services Framework to see if they qualify for a Sovereign Badge or a Resilient Badge.”
[…]
Microsoft is not the only tech giant concerned about sovereignty. Amazon Web Services made its European Sovereign Cloud generally available earlier this year, and Google is selling customers a variety of solutions, including Google Cloud Airgapped, which runs on servers fully disconnected from the internet.
Whether these efforts satisfy customers will hinge on implementation and on how sovereignty is defined. Being able to disconnect completely will satisfy some, though others may still worry that the software remains under Microsoft’s control.
Enterprises in Europe looking to local tech providers to run their entire stack were given an example of how to do it last week. Plug-and-play it is not, but the rewards are obvious.
Source: Worried Europeans can now cut Azure’s phone cord completely • The Register
Robin Edgar
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