Microsoft has promoted its General Counsel Brad Smith to the position of company president and chief legal officer.

According to a Friday email to employees from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Smith will be responsible for “privacy, security, accessibility, environmental sustainability, and digital inclusion,” in addition to his legal responsibilities.

Recently, Smith has worked on establishing the legal foundations for cloud computing on Microsoft-operated servers, reports Fortune.

The position of president of Microsoft has not existed since 2002, when Richard Belluzzo filled the role. Smith has served as Microsoft’s general counsel since 2002.

Security vs. visibility

While Smith won't be involved in the technical issues surrounding cloud security, he will oversee Microsoft’s policies. He has a reputation as a champion of security, penning an editorial in The Wall Street Journal in defense of American tech companies’ right to not turn over customer emails stored exclusively in company data centers in other countries.

Last week, Microsoft bought the cloud security company Adallom, whose security-as-a-service works with well-known cloud applications such as Box and Salesforce — and, of course, Office 365.

According to an SDxCentral survey, most organizations are in the research phase when it comes to adopting advanced security. When asked to identify the major security challenges they faced, a majority of respondents identified an “inability to secure across public and private cloud environments” (57%), a “lack of visibility” (55%) and a “lack of support for virtualized environments” (55%) as their biggest hurdles.