Indian Regulation for Microsoft teams AV (M365)

Updated – 21st April 2020

Thanks to –  Chandrasekar Reddipalli (rchandra@crecer.co.in) | « Crecer Technologies »

Disclaimer:-

• The information provided as is available today from DoT, TRAI and Microsoft and can be change at any point of time, So please consult with your compliance officer before make any decision
• Several DoT circle has exception made looking the COVID-19 outbreak which has enabled few sites to use this service temporarily.
• This post only talk about Microsoft teams VOIP calls usage and no PSTN breakout or call merging scenario is covered

Industry has witnessed the shift to enable their employee to work from anywhere/everywhere. Organizations are adopting several cloud platforms to enable employees to work remotely and Microsoft team has emerged as a leader in UC product line. The cloud based MS Teams ease the way to consume the service but it has increased the compliance and security risk proportionally too.

So now questions arrive that, if we can use Microsoft Teams audio/video service for india based users??

What is required to do to be complainant

Dedicated MPLS with Tenant

You can use dedicated link from your user base to your target Microsoft tenant where your service is hosted. There are some ISP providers those provide such service and you can discuss with them. We understand that routing any M365 traffic over MPLS cloud is not recommended by Microsoft and MS always push you to terminate connection from your local egress, so you can connect Microsoft closed front doors Data-Center.

There is some more caveat with pros/cons of teams meeting hosting (MCU). Your Teams conference location is allocated at the time the first joiner joins (not the organiser, but any first joiner) and it is automatically allocated to the conferencing service in the region nearest to that first joiner. I don’t know how this used case is handled aligned with regulation policy of countries.

Multi-Geo & Certification

1.Enable Multi Geo capability for your tenant

MultiGeo allows you to operate within a single global Office 365 tenant yet provide you with the controls necessary to define where content is stored at rest around the world by Office 365 workloads which support Multi-Geo. With a Multi-Geo enabled tenant in Office 365 you are no longer bound to a single geography for data-at-rest storage. Your content may now be spread across numerous locations such as those depicted in the map below.

As you can see in above picture, Microsoft has built 3 data center in India (Pune, Mumbai and Chennai) and supporting organisation for their data in rest compliance requirement. For now (15^th April 2020), 3 given below workloads is available in Multi Geo capability

1. Exchange online
2. Sharepoint & OneDrive
3. Microsoft Teams (teams backbone service chat, group, Azure media etc ) (added on 6^th Feb 2018 )

The core Teams customer data consists of chat and channel messages, associated media and all the teams and channels present in the tenant.

Images & Media: Media used in chats is stored in an Azure based Media Service that are deployed to the same locations as the chat service. This service is available in India Microsoft Data Center as part of Multi Geo offering.

Chat/ channel messages & team structure  Private chats (including group chats), messages sent as part of a conversation in a channel, and the structure of teams and channels are stored in an Azure powered chat service. Every team in Microsoft Teams is backed by an Office 365 Modern Group and its SharePoint site and Exchange mailbox.