Brunei, Nov 4, 2014 – Microsoft Brunei today announced the availability of its leading cloud service, Microsoft Azure. Azure provides a growing collection of cloud-based integrated services including compute, storage, data, networking, disaster recovery and application services. Having these services in the cloud enable companies to move faster, do more, and save money.
Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This powerful platform enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications any way they like for unmatched productivity.
Michelle Simmons, General Manager for the South East Asia Emerging Markets, Microsoft Asia Pacific, said: “Based on a recent survey we conducted in Asia amongst IT leaders, 71% said they are prioritizing the cloud in the next three years. Clearly, they are seeing the benefits of how the cloud can enable them to be more agile, manage costs and innovate with new technologies.”
With Azure, data storage, backup, and recovery become more efficient and economical. It is also easier to build applications that span across both on-premise and the cloud. It also supports any operating system, language, tool, and framework— from Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, C# to Java. It puts the best of Windows and Linux ecosystems at users’ fingertips, so that developers can build great applications and services that work with every device. It can quickly scale up or down to match demand, so the business only pays for what they use.
“Microsoft’s approach is always to enable choice for the customer. With Azure, we give customers the flexibility to choose between the public cloud, a private infrastructure or something in between. We’re also the only company that offers customers of all sizes enterprise-grade cloud platform that is the best of both worlds,” added Simmons.
Azure shares the same enterprise-tested platform that powers Skype, Office 365, Bing, and Xbox. Azure offers a 99.95% availability Service Level Agreement, 24×7 tech support, and round-the-clock service health monitoring.
A cloud for every business, industry and geography
Azure runs on a growing global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters across 19 regions, giving customers in Brunei a wide range of options for running applications and ensuring they always get great performance. More than 50% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Azure today. From live streaming Olympic events to online multiplayer online games, global customers are doing some amazing things with little investment on minimal physical hardware.
Microsoft continues to deliver innovative features on Azure. Most recently, the company announced machine learning capabilities which will enable companies to applications which take advantage of the Internet of Things and Big Data; as well as new Premium Storage capabilities, which will enable customers to run the most demanding applications and workloads in the largest virtual machines available in the public cloud today. In addition, the new Azure Marketplace was also unveiled, which is an easy way for startups and Independent Software Vendors to connect with enterprises and Azure customers everywhere so their innovative solutions can be deployed in just a few clicks.
Continued Ms Simmons: “These innovations are just a few of the more than 300 major enhancements we’ve made to Azure in the last 12 months. This rapid innovation across our core areas of differentiation – hyper-scale, enterprise grade and hybrid – is what gives us the ability to deliver the industry’s most complete cloud – for every business, every industry and every geography.”
Microsoft Brunei recently conducted training for the first batch of 15 local ICT partners on 30th October 2014 to deliver Microsoft Azure to enterprises in Brunei. In addition, Microsoft is lining up a series of readiness events for local partners and customers in the coming months.
Said Ms Haniza Zakariya, Country Manager, Microsoft Brunei, “From our experience, for companies to truly benefit from enterprise-grade cloud services such as Azure and Office 365, new capability is required. Also the cloud is dynamic and Microsoft continues to innovate and deliver new services. Microsoft is committed to building capability locally through ongoing training for our partners and customers in Brunei to make that leap to the cloud.”
