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?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here