Governments are erecting borders for data

SOMEWHERE DEEP in the bowels of Microsoft’s campus in Redmond near Seattle, a jumble of more than 100 buildings, there is a special kind of room. The size of a school gym, its walls are covered with big screens. One shows the “health” of the firm’s cloud-computing services, collectively called Azure. Another displays people’s “sentiment” about the system, as expressed on social media. A third one, a large map of the world, tells visitors how many “denial-of-service” (DOS) attacks, which amount to flooding a customer’s online presence with bits to shut it down, are currently being dealt with. The counters on this Thursday morning in early December show 80 in Asia, 171 in Europe and 425 in the Americas.

It would be fair to assume that the room is a NOC, a “network operations centre”, to manage Azure. But nothing gets controlled here; that happens elsewhere. Instead, the room, called the Cloud Collaboration Centre (CCC), serves two other purposes. One is, in the words of Anja Ziegler, who manages the location, to “put a face on the cloud”—giving customers an idea what Azure and the mirror worlds it powers are about. But more important, the room serves as a place for Microsoft employees to discuss how to reshape the cloud in response to legal changes in the data economy.