Azure investments in data residency fueling industry adoption of cloud

Data residency is an area we have been investing significantly in Azure to address the needs of customers in government and industry.  I recently shared the article below on the Azure Blog announcing additional datacenter regions for government customers in the United States.  This is a great example of Azure investments to support industry, coupled with innovative and market leading technology in compute, data and cognitive.

--Tom

I am pleased to announce that Azure Government is commercially live in two additional datacenter regions in Arizona and Texas for U.S. government customers and their partners following my announcement late last year. With these expansions, Azure Government has capacity in proximity to government customers and partners on the East Coast, West Coast and Central United States.

With a total of six U.S. datacenter regions, including two dedicated regions with DoD Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization (PA), Azure Government continues to deliver the most customer choice in the U.S. for locating government workloads and sensitive data. As part of offering the broadest geographic availability, these regions are over 500 miles apart for geo-redundancy and we offer data replication across regions for business continuity.

Customers and partners are clear in their feedback that compliance with U.S. government standards and requirements is a priority. To address the compliance needs for U.S. government, we’ve engineered our datacenters and services to meet or exceed critical compliance requirements. In fact, Microsoft provides the broadest coverage for compliance and regulatory standards with support for FedRAMP High, CJIS, ITAR, DFARS, and DoD L4 and L5.

Specific to the future of cloud computing in government, we continue to announce Azure Government services that enable cool new ways for U.S. government customers and their partners to achieve mission. Most recently, we’ve announced:

• PowerBI and HDInsight for data analysis and visualization
• Azure CosmosDB and hot/cool blob storage
• Expanded Cognitive Services Preview and interesting uses for U.S. government
• IoT services

Combining the most datacenter region choices with most comprehensive compliance coverage and innovative services, further extends customer confidence in Azure Government as they deliver mission workloads with the cloud now and into the future.