What international cloud privacy standard means to Microsoft - Smith

ITRealms:

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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