Microsoft’s Australian Azure Data Centres Will Open Next Week

We’ve been waiting quite a while for this, and now it looks like it’s finally happening: Microsoft’s Australian Azure data centres in Melbourne and Sydney will officially launch next week.

Microsoft vice president Scott Guthrie told reporters at Microsoft’s “Cloud Day” press event in the US that the two centres are due to officially open next week, and subsequently confirmed that in a press release. That launch coincides with Microsoft’s Sydney TechEd event, and comes some 17 months after Microsoft first announced its local plans. To put that in perspective: when this plan was announced, Satya Nadella was not Microsoft’s CEO — he was running the cloud division.

Local partners have been testing the two centres since last month, and earlier this month Microsoft announced it had met compliance requirements for Australian government organisations to use the centres for non-sensitive data.

That launch date also means Microsoft has met its promise to launch the centres before the end of 2014. With Amazon also reputedly expanding its local footprint, competition for Australian-based cloud services appears set to be more intense than ever in 2015.


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