The General
Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs at
Microsoft, Mr. Brad Smith has adduced reasons why Microsoft embraced the
international cloud privacy standard, reports ITRealms.
Smith in his blog post on penultimate Monday, 16 February
2015, said that as part of Microsoft commitment to standards that it adhered to
ISO 27018 which assures enterprise customers that privacy will be protected in
several distinct ways.
Some of these ways, Smith explained to ITRealms consist of
the fact that customers are in control of their data.
“Our adherence to the standard ensures that we only process
personally identifiable information according to the instructions that you
provide to us as our customer,” he said.
Also, Smith noted that customers will with this standard
know what is happening to their account and data, which encourages adherence to
transparency about policies regarding the return, transfer, and deletion of
personal information customers store in the data centers.
“We’ll not only let you know where your data is, but if we
work with other companies who need to access your data, we’ll let you know who
we’re working with. In addition, if there is unauthorized access to personally
identifiable information or processing equipment or facilities resulting in the
loss, disclosure or alteration of this information, we’ll let you know about
this,” he said.
Further, Smith said that Microsoft provide strong security
protection for their data, emphasizing that adherence to ISO 27018 provides a
number of important security safeguards.
“It ensures that there are defined restrictions on how we
handle personally identifiable information, including restrictions on its
transmission over public networks, storage on transportable media, and proper
processes for data recovery and restoration efforts. In addition, the standard
ensures that all of the people, including our own employees, who process
personally identifiable information must be subject to a confidentiality
obligation,” he said
Additionally, he said, that customer data would not be used
for advertising, as enterprise customers are increasingly expressing concerns
about cloud service providers using their data for advertising purposes without
consent.
Smith stressed that the adoption of this standard reaffirms Microsoft
longstanding commitment not to use enterprise customer data for advertising
purposes.
“We inform you about government access to data. The standard
requires that law enforcement requests for disclosure of personally
identifiable data must be disclosed to you as an enterprise customer, unless
this disclosure is prohibited by law. We’ve already adhered to this approach
(and more), and adoption of the standard reinforces this commitment,” he said.
+Remmy Nweke (ITRealms) +Microsoft Corporation +Brad Smith
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