How to Find Out if my Office 365 Storage is in Canada

Some people who setup their Office 365 accounts back in the day are curious about where there data is being stored.

The “Where is my data?” Office 365 interactive data maps are great for showing where types of data live (such as Yammer only lives in the USA) however the map does not show where someone’s specific tenancy lives.

You can check where your data resides by:

Go to: Office 365 admin center >  Settings >  Organization Profile > scroll down to Data location.

For a Canadian organization that has set their Office 365 account details to state their country as Canada, does this mean their data is stored in Canadian Datacentres?

No. It all comes down to when you setup your Office 365 Tenancy.

Why Dates Matter…

Customers who signed up for Office 365  before April 20, 2016 and selected Canada for their services have their data stored in the United States datacenter locations.

Customers that signed up for Office 365 after April 20, 2016 and selected Canada for their services have their data stored in the Canadian datacenter locations.

The Data Residency Switch…

Some customers that signed up before April 20, 2016 were able to take advantage of Microsoft’s limited time offer to get their data moved to Canadian datacentres for free. However they had to flip the Data Residency switch in their Office 365 tenancy before the October 31, 2016 deadline.

Ironically those that did flip the switch may still have their data in American servers as Microsoft promised that the data migration would be “complete within 24 months after the end of the enrollment perioid on November 1, 2016.”

The trickiest part of this is they don’t tell you when you’ll be moved or where you are in the queue. All you know is: “You will receive a confirmation in Message Center after each service’s data move has completed.”

Now What… 

You’ve followed the instructions above and discovered your data is in the US, but you:

• Missed the deadline to get on the list for the free migration.
• Made the deadline to get the free migration, but can’t wait any longer and need to move your data to Canada ASAP

Solution:

The fastest way to get it done is to spin up a brand new tenancy and move your data over from the old tenancy.

There’s pros and cons to this approach, but that’s the kind of decision that itgroove can help with.