<https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/07/17/germany-bans-schools-from-using-...> Germany just banned its schools from using cloud-based productivity suites from Microsoft, Google, and Apple. The tech giants aren’t satisfying its privacy requirements with their cloud offerings, it warned. The Hessische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit (Hesse Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, or HBDI) made the statement following a review of Microsoft Office 365’s suitability for schools. Microsoft launched its Azure Deutschland presence in 2016, with a focus on the ‘data trustee’ model. A third party partner, Deutsche Telekom, provided the Azure services and used a private cloud to ensure that none of the resident data went through the public internet. Even Microsoft needed to jump through plenty of hoops to get at its customers’ data. That was a bid to placate German customers who were sensitive about data sovereignty and wanted to keep their data on German soil. That made HBDI confident enough to allow schools there to use Office 365 in August 2017, just so long as they only used the German cloud. An issue with data Microsoft is storing, and where Then, in August 2018, things changed. Microsoft pulled out of the data trustee arrangement in Germany and started using its regular data centre model instead, removing the barrier between the rest of the global Azure cloud and its own German data centres. [...]