As businesses move more workloads to the cloud, business continuity, data protection and resiliency have never been more critical. To further our commitment to supporting data residency, stability and resilience in the cloud, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure Availability Zones from our Norway East datacenter region.
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“We have seen a massive growth in cloud adoption since we opened our data centers in Norway nearly two years ago. With the buildout of Availability Zones, we are enabling customers to bring even more workloads to the Microsoft Cloud, and ensuring we are ready to serve a market growth that is only accelerating”, says Christopher Frenning, Data Center Lead in Microsoft Norway.
Growing data center industry
Minister of Regional Development and Digitalisation, Linda Hofstad Helleland, is happy to see that the data center industry is growing in Norway: "Data centers are important building blocks of our digital infrastructure. Providing the Norwegian industry, as well as the public administration, access to data services from data centers, increases productivity, adds flexibility and stimulates the use of new technology and innovative solutions. In addition, Norway can offer clean and green solutions, which in turn contributes to a more sustainable global data economy", says Helleland.
Only public cloud provider – Within Norway
Availability Zones comprise of a minimum of three zones, allowing customers to spread their infrastructure and applications across discrete and dispersed datacenters for added resiliency and high availability in case of external events or datacenter failures. These are further supported by one of the top industry-leading service level agreements (SLA) of 99.99% virtual machine uptime.
“Microsoft is the only public cloud provider offering services from within Norway, enabling customers with data residency or latency requirements to build resilient, mission-critical systems and accelerate innovation with the hundreds of services available on the Azure platform” continues Frenning.
Data residency
Availability Zones help ensure data protection by storing data in triplicate across the three physical data centers. Customers can choose to store data in the same datacenter, across zonal datacenters in the same region, or across geographically separated regions. “We know that data residency is important to our Norwegian customers, as well as the European market, that is why Microsoft launched the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud earlier this year, The Azure Availability Zones is yet another investment Microsoft is proud to launch in the Norwegian market”, says Lena Lundgreen, Regional Leader Government for EMEA in Microsoft.
he availability zones have been in operation since mid-summer for test users, and several of our largest customers are already taking advantage of the new capabilities, Microsoft is now ready to launch Availability Zones to the general market.
“We’re optimistic and excited to see the impact these Availability Zones will have on customers, their digital transformations, and ultimately their success”, Frenning concludes.
