Microsoft announces three new data centre regions in one week

Azure regions coming to Italy, New Zealand and Poland for the first time

Microsoft has announced that Italy, New Zealand and Poland will soon be getting their first cloud regions, as the technology giant steps up efforts to increase capacity amid constraints in the wake of Covid-19.

A cloud region is made up of at least two data centres to ensure redundancy and avoid a single point of failure for cloud resources.

Microsoft offered no concrete details about when the regions would go live, but the tech giant, which accounts for 17 percent of the global cloud market, did lay out multi-year, multi-billion plans for Italy and Poland, both involving digital skilling and partnership programs alongside data centre construction and access to Azure, Microsoft 365/Office 365 and Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform toolset.

Italy’s five-year $1.5 billion investment plan will also see Microsoft expand its partnership with national postal service, Poste Italiane, provide SMBs access to AI Hubs and programs, and support the country’s green energy efforts through a new cross-sector Sustainability Alliance.

Much of the same is in store for Poland, although Microsoft has committed $1bn to investment and isn’t planning on launching a dedicated sustainability initiative there.

Microsoft now has 61 data centre regions globally in over 140 countries. In Q1, the company’s cloud sales increased 59 percent, taking its share of the global cloud market to 17 percent, where it trails Amazon’s AWS, which enjoys 32 percent of the $31 billion market.

Last month, APAC cloud leader Alibaba Cloud announced plans to invest $28 billion into cloud infrastructure over the next three years following a surge in demand for cloud services that assist remote working.