Why your labs should run on your own Azure, not ours
When the machines live in your tenancy, data residency, security and spending controls stop being someone else's promise.
A lot of lab platforms run everything on infrastructure they own and give you a window into it. It is convenient right up until someone asks where the student data actually lives, who can see it, and which rules apply. Then "trust us" stops being a good enough answer.
The machines live in your tenancy
StudentLabs creates the lab machines inside your Azure subscription, in the region you choose. That one design decision changes a lot:
Coursework stays in the Australian region you pick, which keeps the sovereignty and privacy conversations short. Your existing access rules, policies and monitoring already apply to the machines, because the machines are your resources. And the spending limits and budget alerts you already set are watching the cost from day one.
You are never locked in
Because the compute is yours, you are not trapped. If you ever stop using StudentLabs, the thing that remains is your own Azure subscription, exactly as it was. There is no data to extract from a vendor and no hostage situation over your own students' work.
Running on your own cloud is not the hard option. It is the one that lets your institution keep the guarantees it has already made to students and regulators.
For schools and training providers under real compliance obligations, that inheritance of your existing controls is often the deciding factor, and rightly so.