LAUNCHES 2 REGIONS, 31 EDGEs, 14 MEET-MEs

The cloud arm of the tech giant Microsoft, has just announced the opening of its new Switzerland cloud regions and the global addition of 31 new Azure edge sites.

The new cloud datacenter regions are located near Zurich and Geneva, Switzerland. With its cloud platform now available from these regions, the company stated that more than 30 customer and partner organizations are already using the new Azure services. Some of such customers include UBS Group, the Swiss Re Group, Swisscom, BKW, City of Zug, die Mobiliar, Exploris Health, and Skyguide.

“These new regions and our ongoing global expansion are in response to customer demand as more industry leaders choose Microsoft’s cloud services to further their digital transformations,” said Tom Keane, Corporate Vice President, Azure Global.

“Microsoft cloud services delivered from a given geography, such as our new regions in Switzerland, offer scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud services while helping enterprises and organizations meet their data residency, security, and compliance needs.”

The new cloud regions will also offer Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform (Microsoft intelligent business applications and tools). With this launch, Microsoft now offers its cloud services through a total of 56 regions globally.

It has been a week of accomplishments for Microsoft Azure, as it also announced the launch of 31 new edge sites globally. This will bring the total Azure edge sites to over 150; spread across more than 50 countries.

According to the company, this edge development is in response to customers’ demand for lower-latency cloud applications. This is a handy solution as implementation of edge sites can deliver Microsoft cloud services up to 10 times faster, the company claims.

“By utilizing the expanding network of edge sites, Microsoft provides more than 80 percent of global GDP with an experience of sub-30 milliseconds latency. We are adding new edges every week, and our ambition is to provide this level of performance to all of our global audience,” said Yousef Khalidi Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking.

“This expansion proves its value further when workloads move to the cloud or when Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, Microsoft 365, and Xbox are used. By operating over a dedicated, premium wide-area-network, our customers avoid transferring customer data over the public internet, which ensures security, optimizes traffic, and increases performance.”

In addition, the company’s virtual private connection (VPC) service Azure ExpressRoute, will also get 14 more “meet-me” sites to further enable and expand access to dedicated private connections between customers’ on-premises environments and Azure.