Understanding Office 365 Multi-Geo

• Office 365 Multi-Geo can store user data across multiple regions to help meet local data residency requirements.
• Only a limited set of Office 365 services support Multi-Geo.
• Multi-Geo requires licensing for every user of the service and additional management challenges.

Office 365 Multi-Geo enables an organization to store key types of Office 365 data in a specific region for each user. The feature allows a multinational organization 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 (DLP) on a per-region basis. However, the feature requires licensing a minimum number of users to activate it and incurs a monthly per-user charge. Although Microsoft frequently refers to the feature as Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, this is a misnomer, as Multi-Geo is almost exclusively a feature of Office 365 and is only supported by a limited set of Office 365 services.

How Multi-Geo Works

Multi-Geo is an Office 365 feature that enables an organization (referred to as an Office 365 tenant) to pin certain user data to a specific region other than the primary region of the tenant. For example, a multinational 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 data privacy regulations could be a likely reason for an organization to consider deploying Multi-Geo.

An organization must request that Microsoft enable Multi-Geo on their tenancy. The tenant’s Office 365 data is stored in the region where it was initially created, which Microsoft refers to as a “central location” or “central geo.” Additional “satellite geos” can be added after the feature is enabled for the tenancy. Once satellite geos are created, an administrator can specify the users or groups whose data should reside in each satellite geo. In this multinational tenant example, the U.S. would be the tenant’s central geo, and the E.U. would be its satellite geo; use of other satellite geos beyond the U.S. and the E.U. in this case would be optional.

Since Multi-Geo works by specifying where data should be stored at a user or group level, individual services within Office 365 must be modified to support it, and then users or Microsoft must be assigned a satellite geo for their data to be stored in. This property, referred to as a user’s preferred data location (PDL), is set by an administrator within Azure Active