Microsoft has confirmed plans to launch Australia as one of its Azure regions, with data centres to be located in Sydney and Melbourne. That means that rather than having to locate cloud projects in the nearest Azure data centre (Singapore), they can remain on Australian shores.
Microsoft confirmed the plans in a blog post today. Australia will operate as an independent region, with Sydney and Melbourne used to provide geo-redundancy. (Singapore is paired with Hong Kong for similar purposes).
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• Windows Azure In Australia: Everything You Need To Know
Microsoft has previously been non-committal about plans to build outside its existing global regions. Despite the announcement, the centres aren’t expected to be launched for some time.
One key question will be the pricing model. To date, Microsoft has applied consistent pricing across each of the eight regions in which it currently operates Azure data centres. It will be interesting to see if the same approach applies in Australia. Rival Amazon Web Services, which opened a Sydney data centre year, charges a premium for the location, reflecting the higher costs of bandwidth and labour in the Australian market. Microsoft currently has a commitment to match AWS pricing.
The question of whether hosting within Australia is a legal requirement remains open for many businesses, but many industries still prefer to keep data on-shore. We’ll have more on this development later today.
Windows Azure expands Downunder [Microsoft Australia Blog]
Comments
6 responses to “Microsoft To Launch Australian Azure Region”
Doesn’t matter where it’s located, MS is a US based company and the patriot act is still in effect. I still remember the awkward responses to this at a past Tech-Ed during a Q & A about the Singapore one.
Hi Darren, do you mind elaborating on this? The patriot act and the Q&A?
@darren is correct. US-based company means they are subject to the Patriot Act. No matter where they choose to operate.
@gabe_w – If you want to know more, please refer to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
It’s a huge read and full of legal jargon… http://www.howstuffworks.com/patriot-act.htm explains it a bit better.
Thanks Steve!
The article didn’t mention anything about Office 365. Does anyone know if there will be an option for Office 365 data to be stored locally when these new data centers go in?
Possibly, but I’d say highly unlikely.