the US), but the directory may be supported globally. A tenant can be homed in a specific geo (e.g. In other words, directory data transmission and data processing, including authentication and authorization, may be OCONUS.

Starting with MSO-DS and now with Azure AD in Commercial, directory services are supported globally OCONUS (Outside the Continental United States). Three primary principles emerge with the first release of Commercial: Thus, an enrollment of MSO-DS (now Azure AD) directory services is a ‘tenant ’. The term ‘tenant ’ can be described in a simplified fashion as being the security boundary defined by an instance of MSO-DS for a specific customer enrollment. Back in 2010, Office 365 shipped with a native directory service called Microsoft Online Directory Store (MSO-DS). Office 365 Commercial pre-dates many of the Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S), Azure IaaS and PaaS services we are familiar with today, including the directory services solution we know as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). It has evolved to include many new products including Advanced Threat Protection, Teams, Yammer, Power BI, Stream, the Security & Compliance Center and many more. Today those workloads are branded as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business Online, and Skype for Business Online. Office 365 Commercial originally shipped with the four primary workloads. Thus, if you hear someone from Microsoft refer to Public or Public MT, they are talking about our Commercial environment.įor purposes of this conversation, I will use the term “Commercial” which refers to the environment as opposed to “Enterprise” which refers to licenses. And the term ‘ Public’ indicates that it’s available on the public internet and is often interchangeable with ‘ Global’. Back in 2010, we had a set of dedicated clouds as well, which is why we often differentiate the clouds as Multi-Tenant, meaning not dedicated nor private clouds. What’s it called? Internally, we call the Office 365 Commercial environment ‘ Public Multi-Tenant’ or ‘ Public MT’ for short. Microsoft 365 started with Office 365 Commercial. Please keep in mind these principles are specific to the overlying emphasis on compliance.

I outline principles throughout this article.

I chose to start with this history lesson, as it puts our cloud offerings into perspective and enables an understanding of why, as we go levels deeper when explaining compliance between the various cloud offerings. For a more in-depth explanation, please refer to Understanding Compliance Between Microsoft 365 Commercial, GCC, GCC-High and DoD Offerings. This article is the first of a series in the Microsoft Tech Community Public Sector Blog and touches on several of the key principles for compliance, including data residency versus data sovereignty.

History of microsoft office packages