From InfoWorld: To overcome emotional barriers to cloud computing, cloud providers often give customers complete control over their data, including encryption keys. Microsoft has been unveiling features in that vein for Azure, and yesterday, the company took a few more steps in that direction with Office 365.
The features are about more than customer control of data, though. They also address a long-standing problem among most cloud providers: How can the customer be sure the provider doesn't mess with user data -- and what happens when the provider has no choice but to do so?
Microsoft's answer is Customer Lockbox, an Office 365 feature that gives customers highly granular control over their Office 365 account whenever a Microsoft engineer needs to access content stored within.
According to Vijay Kumar, senior product marketing manager for Office 365, engineers by default don't have access to service operations and have to go through a rigorous multistep process to obtain access to customer data. "We did a lot of engineering to abstract ourselves away from the data," Kumar said in a phone call. "We are only the custodians; it's the customers who own the data."
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