By Cally Chan, General Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong and Macau
November 17, 2021, Hong Kong –– Cloud-first has become the priority strategy for many companies to enable greater innovation, enhanced customer service and is a vital step to keep up with the complex demands of the ever-changing landscape. As Hong Kong enhances its status as an international Innovation and Technology (I&T) hub in the Greater Bay Area, the city acts as a business platform for companies looking to access the Asia market. For innovative companies seeking to go international, a robust, trusted and secure cloud infrastructure to support Hong Kong’s ambition is essential.
In our thirty-year journey in Hong Kong, Microsoft is committed to driving transformation for all organizations, empowering our customers to harness the full potential of Azure. We are honored to have 90% of Hang Seng Index companies running on Microsoft Cloud, driving intelligent data-driven experiences and creating cloud-powered business resiliency.
As part of our commitment to delivering enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to support Hong Kong’s digital economy, we are thrilled to launch Azure Availability Zones in Hong Kong, and to add additional capabilities in our East Asia region effective immediately. Availability Zones provide additional options to improve resilience and high availability for organizations which are increasingly reliant on cloud services to run their business.
With Azure Availability Zones now in Hong Kong, companies can enjoy a wider set of capabilities to create resilient, highly available applications for mission-critical workloads. These are essential steps to empower Hong Kong companies to reinvent and reimagine their business solutions, embracing the new hybrid environment. We are proud to play a role in accelerating their digital transformation and empowering them to unlock new innovations that will benefit Hong Kong people and capture the new opportunities within the Greater Bay Area.
Underpinning our expanded cloud capabilities are physical datacenters, networking and fiber connected to the world’s energy grids. Since 2012, Microsoft has been 100% carbon neutral. Customers already benefit from the cloud’s ability to provide massive efficiency that reduces the collective carbon footprint required to support the world’s compute needs. Microsoft’s commitment is to be carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted, either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. To reach this, datacenters must be part of the solution for broad decarbonization.
The datacenters powering the Microsoft Cloud provide the high availability, resiliency and security a company needs, and the energy efficiency and carbon savings a business wants. We look forward to empowering Hong Kong with our expanded cloud capability, and building a greener future along the way.
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