The ABC of Azure Belgium Central

During the announcement of our Digital AmBEtion program and the Belgium datacenter region, we spoke about providing customers local data residency and faster access to the cloud.

In this post, I would like to elaborate a bit more on what that means and how the Belgian datacenter region fits within the global Microsoft cloud.

If you have explored our Azure global infrastructure map recently, you’ve seen that our newly announced datacenter region in Belgium will carry the name Azure Belgium Central, or ABC for short. Easy to remember!

A stands for Azure, and Availability Zones

Our global Azure cloud is comprised of multiple geographies. Geographies define data residency and compliancy boundaries. A geography contains one or more regions. Belgium Central is, for now, the only region in the geography Belgium. Other, larger geographies have multiple regions; eg. the United Kingdom geography has 2 regions: UK South and UK West.

A region, in its turn, consists of three or more Availability Zones, each having one or more datacenter structures. Availability zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region that are tolerant to local failures and achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads. Every zone has its own energy connection, networking and water supply. Each location is carefully chosen using an extensive list of?risk assessment criteria.

All Availability Zones in a region fall within a 2 ms latency perimeter, allowing flawless failover in the unlikely event of a zonal outage.

To be able to benefit from Availability Zones, the specific cloud services that you use need to support it. We have committed that all foundational and mainstream Azure IaaS and PaaS services will be AZ enabled. Note that some services are zone-redundant by design (eg. Azure Cosmos DB) while others (VMs) are deployed in one zone and give you the option to replicate them to one or more zones.

B stands for Belgium, and local data residency

The Belgian datacenter region allows customers to use the services of the hyperscale Azure cloud, locally served. When you deploy services or applications on the Belgium Central region, your data will be stored at rest in Belgium.

This is particularly relevant for companies and organizations that have strong preference or (legal) needs to store data within the geographical boundary of the country.

You can read more about data residency on our Azure website.

During our announcement, Stephanie De Bruyne, CEO of Belgian Mobile ID, explained why it's important to be close to itsme's end-users:

Our itsme? application delivers a safe and reliable digital identity enabling mobile authentication and digital signing. We chose Microsoft because of their holistic view on security, trust and data processing within the boundaries of the EU. The new Belgian datacenter region will allow us to bring the data even closer to our end users

Our EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud provides additional measures for commercial or public sector customers in the European Union. Microsoft went beyond its existing data?residency?commitments and is enabling you to process and store all your data in the EU.

C stands for Central, and being in the heart of Belgium and Europe

Being in the heart of the country enables even faster access to the cloud for Belgian companies and organizations. This enables new types of innovation that require low latency connectivity.

Think about metaverse experiences, where the physical world will deeply integrate with the digital world using virtual and mixed reality; smart cities that monitor, measure, and respond in realtime; mobility as a service where many heterogeneous (semi-)autonomous and non-autonomous systems will have to communicate with each other and beyond.

It also enables companies to successfully deploy hybrid cloud strategies where legacy applications run in a local datacenter and new innovative cloud solutions on Azure, while being very close to each other.

During our announcement Guido Lemeire, CIO of NMBS-SNCB, explained why the data center region will help the railways with their innovation agenda:

We purposefully chose a cloud strategy to benefit from the added security of a public cloud, improve time-to-market of projects, capitalize on the flexibility to scale, and unlock smart mobility innovation. Technology is a key enabler for what we call Mobility as a Service. Microsoft's investment in a local datacenter region is crucial for our plans.

Our Belgium Central datacenter region is sized to the needs of Belgian organizations and companies, but it will be available for others as well.

Companies or organizations that want or need to be close to the heart of the European Union, can deploy their workloads in the Belgium Central region once available.