Cisco Webex Announces Teams Data Residency in EMEA

What is Driving Data Residency Needs for our Customers?

Today, in a world that is getting smaller and becoming more interconnected, there are two conflicting trends:

Large enterprises pushing to move to the cloud for all workloads. Even cloud-conservative industries like the financial sector and public sector are moving their IT workloads to the cloud.
A second conflicting but very relevant trend is increased data privacy needs and data jurisdiction. Customers and the public sector would like to ensure they can meet the privacy needs of their users’ and also be assured that foreign jurisdictions do not have access to their stored data.

Customers depend on cloud vendors to solve these data residency needs. This leads to cloud vendors creating regional or even country-specific data centers.

Meeting Our Customers’ Collaboration Needs

Cisco Webex has the largest global data center footprint in the industry and has long been supporting regional storage of information for meetings. With this announcement, we are adding a local data center for Cisco Webex Teams. Cisco Webex is aware of a new challenge created as we look to move to local data centers for Teams, to meet our customers’ collaboration needs – an underserved need for simple, secure cross-company, cross-data center communication. All collaboration should be borderless and intuitive for the user, just like making a direct phone call overseas to someone in another country. This challenge pushes us to innovate in ensuring seamless collaboration – and is why we’ve worked to provide more than just data residency options.

Watch the video to find out more:

How is Cisco Webex Responding to European Customers’ Needs?

Cisco Webex has invested in a 360-degree approach to privacy, security, and compliance. Cisco Webex is also the most secure collaboration suite of products with industry-defining capabilities like true end-to-end encryption and option for customers to host keys on-premise, as noted in our security blog here. We have a host of industry certifications and privacy shields as noted here.

We are now taking our assurances for EMEAR a step further by introducing new Webex Teams-dedicated data centers in Europe. These data centers already support partial data locality for PII and encryption keys for European customers. With the upgrade to these data centers, our EMEAR customers will be ensured of 100% data is stored regionally, including messages, files, whiteboards, and meta-data AND get all collaboration services closer to their users (reducing latency and improving end-user experience),.

So What’s the Big Deal with Cisco Webex?

One of the best parts of our solution is not just that there is another regional data center, but also that no compromise has been made to provide users a frictionless collaboration experience. Cisco Webex Teams services are federated across data centers. Our users can use the Webex Teams client to collaborate with anyone, anywhere without worrying about which data centers their data will be stored. Our customer administrators and security overseers have nothing to worry about regarding administration, compliance, provisioning, and security, as noted by Abhay Kulkarni and Niraj Gopal.

Enjoy the Same User-Friendly Experience Without Compromising Security

Traditional providers require setting up multiple guest accounts and user identities – meaning end users have to keep track of separate conversations with those outside of the country or company with multiple conversation threads. And on top of that, their IT admins are faced with multiple security exposure points and don’t have visibility of content – it goes out in the ether – meaning Data Loss Prevention policies can’t be enforced. User Identities are stored in each regional data center, and meet/Message/Call user(s) may be limited based on the population of regional id.

We’re happy that we can still provide the same user-friendly experience while meeting the data storage needs of our customers.

As a Webex customer, we are extremely pleased with the Webex Teams Data Residency launch in the EMEAR. The EU has taken the lead in addressing data privacy concerns through regulatory requirements. It is assuring to see Cisco Webex is addressing our needs by setting up a data center for data storage in Europe. We can sleep well at night now that our data remains within EU jurisdiction, while also meeting the GDPR requirements from a privacy perspective. We were very happy to participate in the initial trials. In addition, Webex Teams has not compromised on the promise of frictionless and seamless global collaboration through a Federated architecture, while still keeping security forefront with true, end-to-end encrypted content and cross-organization compliance visibility. –Arthur Greiderer CEO, GRZ IT Center, GMBH

With Cisco Webex, you get:

Single User Identity stored in the regional data center
Meet/Message/Call any user(s) across the globe
No Guest accounts required (no copies of user’s PII)

You don’t need to set up multiple user accounts and your IT admins have visibility into cross-company conversations – and can continue to use Cisco Cloudlock for DLP and Cisco Talos anti-malware to contain threats from collaborators outside of your company. Your users can collaborate knowing their data is safe and when it comes time to store data – it knows where to go based on user location.