Licensing Office 365 Multi-Geo

• Office 365 Multi-Geo stores data in additional regions to meet data residency requirements.
• Initially Multi-Geo licensing is limited to large organizations.

Office 365 Multi-Geo enables an organization to store key types of Office 365 data in a specific region for each user. The feature could allow multinational organizations regions to operate as a single connected organization while complying with jurisdictional regulations, as well as controlling functions of features such as eDiscovery and data loss prevention on a per-region basis. However, the feature incurs a per-user charge and a minimum number of users to activate.

How Multi-Geo Works

Multi-Geo is an Office 365 feature that enables an Office 365 tenant to pin certain user data (currently a user’s Exchange Online mailbox and OneDrive for Business Online site) to a specific region, other than the primary region of the tenant. For example, a tenant that originally provisioned Office 365 in the United States might use Multi-Geo to pin data in the European Union (E.U.) for certain users to ensure that data stored by employees who are citizens of the E.U. is stored in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compliance with other privacy regulations could be a likely reason for an organization to consider deploying Multi-Geo.