Microsoft introduces disconnected local instances of Azure, MS365 and Foundry

Microsoft has described digital sovereignty as becoming a "strategic requirement", resulting in the company making Azure Local available in disconnected environments, as well as introducing disconnected instances of Microsoft 365 Local and locally hosted large language models.

With Azure Local disconnected operations, management, policy and workload execution stay within the customer-operated environments,  so services continue running securely even when environments must be isolated or connectivity is not available. 

Organisations can deploy and govern workloads locally without depending on continuous connection to public cloud services. Azure Local is designed to scale with mission-critical needs from smaller deployments to larger footprints that support data-intensive and AI-driven workloads. 

Microsoft 365 Local disconnected delivers Microsoft’s core server workloads - Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Skype for Business Server supported through at least 2035 - directly into the customer’s sovereign private cloud.

With Microsoft 365 Local, teams can communicate, share information and collaborate securely within the same controlled boundary as their infrastructure and AI workloads. Everything runs locally, under customer-owned policies, with full control of data resiliency, access and compliance. 

Microsoft also announced that organisations can now bring large AI models into fully disconnected, sovereign environments with Foundry Local. 

Using infrastructure from partners like NVIDIA, customers with sovereign needs will now be able to run multimodal models locally on their own hardware inside strict sovereign boundaries, enabling local AI inferencing in fully disconnected environments. 

“Customers facing strict sovereignty and regulatory requirements are clear that a fully disconnected sovereign private cloud is a key business need,” the company said.

“Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud is designed to meet these needs head-on, enabling secure, compliant operations even in environments with no external connectivity.”

Azure Local disconnected operations and Microsoft 365 Local disconnected are now available worldwide, and large models on Foundry Local are available to qualified customers. 

Sovereign Private Cloud unifies Azure Local, Microsoft 365 Local and Foundry Local, bringing infrastructure, productivity and support for large AI models to any operational boundary.