2   Data Storage

2.1  Where your data is stored

ABR hosts its service entirely in Microsoft Azure. At the time of writing, customer data is stored in Azure SQL databases located in six geographic regions. Each region operates a primary and a secondary data center.

Your data is stored in a data center that is located in one of the geographic locations listed below. These are in Europe, the USA, the UK and Asia.

To determine your data location, go to page Tenant Settings > Data in the portal and click the RETENTION tab.

Note the geographic location shown in field Data Location - it will be one of the following:

  • EU West, Netherlands (Europe)

  • US East, Virginia (USA)

  • US West, California (USA)

  • London, United Kingdom (UK)

  • EU Central, Germany (Europe)

  • Singapore (Asia)

By default, ABR uses the region matching the customer’s location. However, customers may request storage in another region when licensing the service. No customer data is stored outside these designated regions.

Refer to Data Collection for regional IP address details.

2.2  Backup and retention

Data is real-time geo-replicated between two locations in each region to ensure backup, fail-over and disaster recovery. Microsoft backs up Azure SQL databases and guarantees an Azure SQL restore is possible from any minute of the day, within the last 30 days. We also do cold storage backups in case of a complete, irrecoverable Microsoft Azure failure on all locations in a region.

Auditlog data is kept for 12 months by default. Administrators can set the retention period from three months to five years via portal menu Settings > Tenant Settings > Data > RETENTION.

2.3  Service Level Agreement

Our web servers are located in the same Azure Availability Set in each continent.

An Azure Availability Set is a guarantee that Microsoft will not take web servers down for maintenance at the same time. Microsoft guarantees a 99.95% up time in each continent under this arrangement.

Refer to Service Level Agreements (SLA) for Online Services for more information on Microsoft's commitment to its customers.

For more information on our commitment to you, refer to: