By Cally Chan, General Manager, Microsoft Hong Kong
Microsoft Datacenter Series (2/3)
Microsoft is on cloud nine. Our Q1 earnings beat expectations, driven by strong cloud growth. Our commercial cloud revenue was up 47 percent year-on-year, while Azure revenue rose 76 percent over the year.
Microsoft, one of the largest cloud operators in the world, has invested more than USD15 billion in building a resilient cloud infrastructure and cloud services that are highly available and secure. “Azure is the only hyperscale cloud that extends to the edge across identity, data, application platform, security and management. We are investing aggressively to build Azure as the world’s computer,” said Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft.
It is all about the big picture, and always has been for Microsoft.
Bringing proximity to where your data is
With 54 Azure regions available in 140 countries, Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider. Why is it important to have so many regions?
Within each region, multiple datacenters exist to provide for redundancy and high availability. It is important to create Virtual Machines (VMs) closest to your users and to meet your legal, compliance, or tax purposes.
A datacenter that is close to your company’s offices is a common requirement for companies when choosing your datacenter vendor. However, the advantages go well beyond providing easy access for your staff. Close data center proximity to your location helps improve the performance of your IT infrastructure. A site that is physically close reduces data latency issues. Minimizing latency delays has always been important for application performance and keeping data center proximity close helps.
Microsoft’s comprehensive datacenter network in Asia
Our powerful cloud capabilities are complemented by our comprehensive datacenter network in Asia. Our datacenters are located in Australia, China#, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Japan and Singapore.
The geographic disparity of Azure Regions is important. Global distribution of Azure Regions is strategic according to geography. There are many factors involved in their placement; from geo-political to internet latency for large population centers.
Having a comprehensive presence in Asia enable us to provide the best services to our customers. Some of the biggest brands in Asia are running on Microsoft cloud, including LG, Samsung, Tata, Tencent, Toyota, Virgin Atlantic Airways. Our strong customer momentum for Azure in Asia Pacific is an endorsement of future product roadmap, strong partner ecosystem and continued datacenter investments in this region.
Hong Kong as Asia’s datacenter hub
Our East Asia datacenter in Hong Kong is paired with our Southeast Asia datacenter in Singapore, making this the biggest Microsoft datacenter pair in Asia.
Within our Azure regions, each region is paired with another one within the same geography. Each Azure Region in a pair are always located greater than 300 miles apart when possible. This is to isolate each region in the pair from being affected by the same regional disasters that could take one of the regions down. These disasters could be natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons, or man-made disasters such as civil unrest, power outages or physical network outages.
Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one at a time to minimize downtime and risk of application outage.
We are committed to delivering value to companies of all sizes and help all our customers to reinvent themselves for their digital transformation journey in an intelligent cloud, intelligent edge world.
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#China datacenters are operated by our local partners