So I know this is not strictly Group Policy news however I am from Australia and this news was just to good for us Aussies to not mention. Microsoft Australia has just announced on their blog that they would be expanding their Azure service to Australia. What this means for many organisation is of course they can now start to use Microsoft Azure while negating a lot of the issues with data sovereignty. In my personal experience I have certainly heard a lot of organisation (both corporate and government) have concerns about going to the cloud. Obviously Microsoft has also heard a similar story to justify the cost of setting up a local presence. Of course it also means they can also compete locally with Amazon EC2 and Rackspace which have also recently setup a datacentre Australia presence.

This is also somewhat good news for our close New Zealand neighbours, as while it might not get around some data sovereignty issues it does mean they can now host services much physically closer to home and thus with far lower latency.

For more information about the Security regarding the Windows Azure also check out the blog post by Rocky Heckman at  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rockyh/archive/2013/05/21/windows-azure-in-australia-how-does-that-change-your-security-outlook.aspx

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ausblog/archive/2013/05/21/windows-azure-expands-downunder.aspx