Dubbed “Microsoft 365 Local,” this patch-job of a product is designed to run on Azure Local, a flavour of its cloud that Microsoft claims delivers Azure’s hypervisor magic but inside your datacentre.

Microsoft trotted out executive veep Judson Althoff to flog the thing, claiming it gives customers “full control on security, compliance and governance.” 

The move is pitched as a gift to European firms desperate to stay within the legal fortress of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Alongside this sovereignty stunt, Microsoft  paraded something called “Data Guardian,” which supposedly ensures only Euro-based Microsoft staff can poke around EU data. That oversight, says Redmond, will be “approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time” and logged in a ledger that apparently cannot be fiddled with.

Microsoft  made noises about External Key Management on-prem via Azure’s Managed HSM service, though it admitted it still needs hardware partners like Thales and Utimaco to make that bit work. As usual, the security sounds better than it probably is.

The entire sovereign cloud façade is still in preview with vague promises to hit general availability across Europe sometime later this year, assuming nothing breaks or gets delayed into oblivion.