Clients of Microsoft's Office 365 and Azure public cloud services from the United Kingdom (UK) can now rejoice, as the tech company is opening up two new data center regions for public use.
First talk about Microsoft offering a UK data center region dates back to November 2015, and the launch was supposed to happen in early 2016. Albeit a bit behind schedule, the two regions are now live, and users can identify them as United Kingdom West and United Kingdom South.
Cloud service providers, Microsoft included, benefit greatly from having additional regions with data centers.
The main reason is that some organizations and government authorities are required by law to host their files and data used by proprietary apps in particular geographical regions.
In the global cloud service competition, Azure has to fight with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google's Cloud Platform. AWS already announced that it is looking into opening up a UK data center region, and rumors speculate that Google will extend its data center regions for the Cloud Platform soon enough.
Earlier this year, Microsoft bolstered its cloud security for Office 365 and Azure to stay ahead of its main rivals, Amazon and Google.
Takeshi Numoto, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise business, detailed in a blog post which clients will tap into the newly inaugurated data center regions.
The largest mental health trust, the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, is one of them. The second, and arguably more prominent customer of Microsoft, will be the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
"The MoD [...] will use Office 365 and Azure, citing both value for money and security as key reasons for the agreement," Numoto points out.
UK's defense ministry has more than 230,000 people employed, and is spending more than £3 billion ($4.02 billion) per year for its infrastructure.
Geographic proximity is only one of the means by which cloud infrastructure rivals are attempting to overpass each other. Another way in which companies lure clients from the competition is by offering unique features and consistent price cuts.
In July, Microsoft reported that Azure's compute usage registered an increase of more than 100 percent compared to last year's numbers.
In his blog post, Numoto also touts that Dynamics CRM Online support will be coming to the UK regions in the first half of 2017.
With the addition of the new UK regions, Azure goes to 28 supported regions, and six more are announced to be deployed soon. This gives Microsoft an edge over its rivals, as it is the largest cloud provider by number of regions.
Should you be curious to learn more about the Microsoft Cloud, go to the UK News Center and get familiar with the benefits of the cloud services provided by Azure and Office 365.
