Data management at Microsoft
Protecting and managing your customer data
You own your data
We do not use or share customer data for advertising
How we use data to improve service
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting for preventing, detecting, and repairing problems affecting operations of services.
Feature improvement
Ongoing improvement of features including increasing reliability and protection of services and data.
Personalized customer experience
Data is used to provide personalized improvements and better customer experiences.
What happens to your data if you leave the service
Microsoft is governed by strict standards and removes cloud customer data from systems under our control, overwriting storage resources before reuse, and purging or destroying decommissioned hardware.
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In our Microsoft Product Terms, , Microsoft contractually commits to specific processes when a customer leaves a cloud service or the subscription expires. This includes deleting customer data from systems under our control.
If you terminate a cloud subscription or it expires (except for free trials), Microsoft will store your customer data in a limited-function account for 90 days (the “retention period”) to give you time to extract the data or renew your subscription. During this period, Microsoft provides multiple notices, so you will be amply forewarned of the upcoming deletion of data.
After this 90-day retention period, Microsoft will disable the account and delete the customer data, including any cached or backup copies. For in-scope services, that deletion will occur within 90 days after the end of the retention period. (In-scope services are defined in the Data Processing Terms section of our Microsoft Product Terms.)
When customer data is hosted in the multitenant environments of Microsoft business cloud services, we take careful measures to logically separate customer data. This helps prevent one customer’s data from leaking into that of another customer, which also helps to block any customer from accessing another customer’s deleted data.
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If a disk drive used for storage suffers a hardware failure, it is securely erased or destroyed before Microsoft returns it to the manufacturer for replacement or repair. The data on the drive is completely overwritten to ensure the data cannot be recovered by any means.
When such devices are decommissioned, they are purged or destroyed according to NIST 800-88 Guidelines for Media Sanitation.
Data policy of Microsoft services
Azure Data protection
“Data deletion” is discussed on page 21 in the Data Protection in Azure document.
Data management resources
How Microsoft categorizes data
Where your data is located
Who can access your data
Additional resources
Microsoft Privacy Statement
Learn about the personal data Microsoft processes, how we process it, and for what purposes.
Microsoft Licensing Terms
Licensing terms, conditions, and supplemental information for Microsoft Volume Licensing programs.
- [1] The information on this page does not apply to Bing Search Services or Windows, except for the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Desktop Analytics services and Windows diagnostic data processor configuration.
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