My work is very much involving this, and it does have to do with protecting customers, because those customers won't exist unless Microsoft stands up to this. It's very much an issue with all companies that are non-US.
That's why my company is putting datacenters everywhere. Chinese demand a Chinese data center for Cloud computing. This happens all over the world, and our strategy is all about that.
This is a very real issue, and if the US states that any US company has to turn over data, you can kiss every customer from another country goodbye.
This is a very real issue, and if the US states that any US company has to turn over data, you can kiss every customer from another country goodbye.
It's not as if Microsoft is selling access to the highest bidder, or considering a request from another company or a charity. Turning over specific data in the face of a court order is not going to drive every customer away, many will see that as acceptable, low risk, reasonable behaviour.
I've worked on many bid (on both sides of the table) where US based hosting was forbidden either by the bid process or by law (the new Australian privacy legislation makes it much simpler to keep data on-shore).
At the moment many companies just resort to using the Australian Amazon data centre, and everyone is ok.
If MS loses this case, I'd say 70% of those (enterprise) contracts using Amazon will use a non-US-owned provider simply because the risk is yet another things that has to be overcome.
That's why my company is putting datacenters everywhere. Chinese demand a Chinese data center for Cloud computing. This happens all over the world, and our strategy is all about that.
This is a very real issue, and if the US states that any US company has to turn over data, you can kiss every customer from another country goodbye.
It's an extremely serious situation in my view.