On Monday, groups of diverse interests - including corporate lobbyists, academics, and news organizations - rallied for Microsoft in the company's ongoing overseas data battle with the US government, by filing briefs with a federal appeals court in New York.

The groups rallying for Microsoft include the biggest US corporate lobby, the US Chamber of Commerce; American Civil Liberties Union; and 35 computer science and engineering professors, among others.

In the briefs, the groups supporting Microsoft have requested the federal appeals court to overturn a judge's verdict which requires Microsoft to hand over emails from an Irish data center to US authorities. Though it is not yet clear as to why the overseas data center emails are being sought from Microsoft, prosecutors have asserted that the emails are required for a drug investigation.

With Microsoft trying to fend off a 2013 government search warrant for emails from a data center in Ireland, the groups rallying for Microsoft have put forth the argument the turning over of overseas data by Microsoft would jeopardize the future of global cloud computing.

To elaborate the argument, lawyer Andrew Pincus - who filed a brief for groups - said that businesses want to ensure that legal records, intellectual property and merger plans are generally private from authorities worldwide; and added: "If by putting them in the cloud, you lose control over them and the government just gets access whenever it wants, nobody's going to do that."