Azure Expands Availability Zone In Southeast Asia Region

Microsoft has just announced the expansion of its Southeast Asia Azure Region in Singapore with the launch of a new availability zone.

As explained by Microsoft, Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. To ensure resiliency, there’s a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions.

To meet Microsoft Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99 percent Virtual Machine uptime, it is optimal to have such expansion. This will not just maintain status quo, but welcome investors who want to implement mission-critical and resilient applications for comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.

Patrik Bihammar, Cloud & Enterprise Lead, Microsoft Singapore, stated in his post that the new availability zone builds upon Microsoft extensive cloud portfolio and strengthen its cloud capabilities to meet the needs of customers, including public sector and corporate customers. He added this, “By building application architecture using a combination of Availability Zones with Azure region pairs, customers can synchronously replicate applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability within Singapore, and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for geographic disaster recovery protection.”

Microsoft’s stay in Singapore is not without satisfying the national compliance offerings.   Patrik affirmed this via the post when he stated “Microsoft is the global cloud service provider with the most comprehensive cloud certifications, including achieving Level 3 of the Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) Standard for Singapore (SS 584).”

With 54 regions and 140 available zones globally, Microsoft Azure remains one of the giants in Cloud services globally and in Asia. However, other providers such as Google plans to have new regions for Osaka and Hong Kong while Alibaba group is also finding its way up the Cloud Chart with Asia-Pacific as a priority region for its growth.