Te Tumu Paeroa, the office of the Maori Trustee, has signed an agreement to become the anchor tenant of Microsoft's upcoming New Zealand cloud region.

Te Tumu Paeroa provides support for the Maori Trustee, which administers freehold land and other assets on behalf of landowners.

The agreement with Microsoft and associated cloud migration is hoped to help landowners recover from major weather events more quickly, support innovation on key issues such as climate change, and collaborate more easily with other organizations.

The cloud migration is being assisted by DDS IT, an IT services provider.

The move is underpinned Te Tumu Paeroa's data sovereignty framework, which requires taonga (data) related to the land and its stakeholders to be safeguarded and dictates how it should be managed in the cloud.

The Maori Trustee currently administers as trustee or agent around 1,800 land trusts across Aotearoa (New Zealand), and works on behalf of more than 100,000 owners with multiple land interests. Te Tumu Paeroa manages the finances, leases, and contracts, and handles statutory matters such as health, safety, and sustainability requirements.

"We're both a kaitiaki for the land, and for all the data relating to it. In Te Ao Maori, data carries the mana (identity), tapu (sacredness), and mauri (spirit) of the person and land it represents - and once you acknowledge that, it changes the way you handle and manage the data,” said Ruth Russell, chief information officer for Te Tumu Paeroa.

“For that reason, our preference is to keep taonga for which we are a kaitiaki onshore, and not to send it overseas as other taonga have been."

Thus far, Te Tumu Paeroa has stored most of its data in on-premises data centers.

DDS IT chief executive Simon Browne said: "What's been astounding beyond words is the deep sense of connection between the data, the whenua, and its people. Just as the move to the Azure data centers will benefit the land by reducing the data's carbon footprint, and the data by giving it greater resilience, better use of the data will help Aotearoa become more sustainable as well.”

Te Tumu Paeroa won NZ$20.9 million (US$12.51m) in the 2021 Budget to improve its technology systems.

The New Zealand government has a "cloud first" strategy, and has ordered around 200 agencies to migrate their storage and processing to the cloud. In light of this, Internal Affairs is now testing the cost efficiency of the move.

Microsoft first announced plans to develop a data center region in New Zealand in May 2020, receiving approval in September of that year. In 2022, the company revealed that the cloud region would be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, later signing a 51MW geothermal PPA with Contact Energy.

New Zealand's largest company, dairy giant Fonterra, and Auckland Transport have both already committed to migrating to the New Zealand cloud region.

The New Zealand cloud region will be located in Auckland, and is still listed as "coming soon."