Microsoft is gaining ground in the cloud with global expansion

IDC recently reported that by the end of this decade the total amount of data on Earth will be around 40 zettabytes – a zettabyte is a ‘1’ followed by twenty-one ‘0’s.[1] The need for all this data and the cloud applications that utilize it, have caused the demand for infrastructure to grow exponentially, and spending on public cloud services is expected to sky rocket to an estimated $175 billion by 2020.[2]

This week we announced several investments to help meet this demand and bring Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online to more customers and more countries around the world. With services soon to be available in 22 regions for Azure, and 9 regions for Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Cloud customers benefit from the innovation and scale of the public cloud, while also benefiting from the data residency, geographic redundancy and improved latency benefits of locally hosted services.

Canada

We started the week in Canada, where on Tuesday, June 2, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner announced plans to deliver locally hosted Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online from Toronto and Quebec City in 2016 – this data residency will provide Canadian businesses with improved latency and geographic redundancy to help them better operate and compete.

With IDC estimating Canadian spend on public cloud to increase by 45 percent in 2016, this expansion is essential for supporting customers like Diply.com, an Ontario-based start-up leveraging Azure for its cloud-based infrastructure. The company receives 590 million page views per month (that’s more than Craigslist and right behind Netflix according to Alexa.com) and it doesn’t own a single server. With Azure, Diply.com is able to rent servers by the hour based on demand, with their cost per 1000 users coming out to only 11 cents.

India

On June 3, we moved to India, where our EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie announced new cloud services coming to India, including Office 365 and the upcoming private preview of Microsoft Azure, available in July 2015. Additionally, Microsoft confirmed that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be a service available from the India datacenters in the first half of 2016.

These announcements are the next step in our journey to bring locally hosted Microsoft Cloud services to India. We expect this investment to accelerate innovation in private and public sectors, benefiting industries such as e-governance, financial inclusion, healthcare and education, with the potential to positively impact the lives of a billion people.

The Netherlands

On June 4, we concluded our week in The Netherlands, where we announced the expansion of our datacenter to bring even more compute power to our customers.

I’m very excited about the progress we’ve made this week, and it’s only the beginning. As global demand for cloud services increases you’ll see us continue to invest to bring the Microsoft Cloud to our customers and partners.

[1] EMC Digital Universe Study, with data and analysis by IDC, April 2014.

[2] Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Microsoft Report Latest Cloud Numbers by IDC, April 2015.

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