Silicon Valley technology giants, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all been caught in a fierce battle to prove their might as the most reliable cloud service providers for developers and enterprises. Under the leadership of chief exec Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been diverting its focus more towards cloud and its related infrastructure. And today, the company has taken another step to further cement its position as the cloud provider you can truly trust.
At a cloud and policy-focused event in Dublin, Microsoft stated that the company has invested a total of $3 billion and doubled its cloud capacity in Europe in the past year. And following in these footsteps, Microsoft has today announced its plans to further expand its reach into the European market by building data centers in France by 2017. This announcement comes at the heels of the launch of an AWS French data center in the last month.
These new data centers will complement the existing options in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, and the Netherland — which will also be expanded to new regions.
We continue to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from European customers and partners. Building a global, trusted, intelligent cloud platform is core to our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. There’s never been a better time for organizations across Europe to seize new growth and opportunity with the Microsoft Cloud,
said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft during the presentation.
Microsoft’s chief exec didn’t drop any names(ahem! Amazon) but took the stage to announce the expansion plans and boast about them now being the largest cloud service provider in the world. The company now has more than 30 data center regions across the globe, and it is essentially “more regions than any other cloud provider”.
But as the popularity of cloud services has grown, so has the fear and caution about the safety of data among the populous. Though Privacy and data protection have became the core aspects of living on the internet, there have been ‘innate’ requests of data-transfer by government and its agencies. This is true in the case where the U.S government had asked the company to provide them with e-mail data dump from their data centers in Ireland. But, the court ruled against the same and Microsoft walked away without having to serve any data.
Microsoft’s now taking the privacy of an individual more seriously and has started setting up individual data centers within countries to ensure that all data is stored and managed locally. In addition, the company has also implemented a first-of-its-kind model in Germany where the control to the data center has been passed onto a data trustee.
The collective investments, including datacenter hubs in the Netherlands and Ireland, which continue to expand, together with locations in Austria and Finland, enable Microsoft to meet anticipated customer demand [for security and compliance needs] in Europe.
reads the official press release.
The new expansion and investment plans fall in line with ‘Cloud for Global Good’, a book launched by the Redmond giant. It is a sort-of directory that details 78 public policy recommendations in 15 categories, like data protection and exploitation or fraud, to help make cloud technologies more trusted, responsible and inclusive.
Commenting on the launch of this publication, Microsoft President Brad Smith says,
Cloud computing has the potential to solve some of our world’s most challenging issues, but, as with all technological advancements, it raises important questions for society. We must work together to build a cloud for global good. Our hope is that the ideas shared in this book will help move technology forward while ensuring no one is left behind.
