Judge orders Microsoft to turn over data held overseas 1
In a case closely watched in the United States and overseas, a federal judge in New York held Thursday that Microsoft must comply with a U.S. search warrant to turn over a customer’s e-mails held in a server overseas.
Judge Loretta Preska — in a surprise ruling from the bench — upheld a magistrate judge’s opinion in December ordering the Redmond, Wash., company to allow federal authorities to obtain copies of the data, which is stored in Ireland.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
The major concern of the ruling is that it could easily push international companies to select cloud hosts that are not US based (for instance a medical software service selecting to host with an Open Stack cloud provider rather than AWS or Azure).
On a good note, Microsoft is appealing again and the judge actually suspended her order until the appeal is decided. It is not surprising to see Microsoft fight this; their cloud services have been quickly growing in the last couple years. I would expect to see Amazon and Google take the same position; as both also provide cloud base services.
