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Microsoft To Open More Cloud Datacenters

In an effort to increase its cloud footprint, Microsoft recently announced plans to open two new datacenters in Canada.

The two Canadian datacenters will be located in Quebec City and Toronto, and will open sometime in 2016, Microsoft said in its announcement last week. Microsoft will host its Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online cloud services from there.

In all, Microsoft said it will shortly have 22 cloud regions and datacenters for Azure and nine for Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online.

"This data residency will provide Canadian businesses with improved latency and geographic redundancy to help them better operate and compete," said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft's corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise marketing, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft pointed to an IDC forecast that projects spending on cloud computing services in Canada will grow by 45 percent next year to $2.5 billion. Microsoft claims 80,000 Canadian businesses are already using its cloud services, including Diply.com, a startup based in Ontario that uses Azure to push 850 million page views per day. Other key Canadian customers are AutoTrader, Genetec and PCL Construction.

Microsoft also announced plans to expand its datacenter facilities in the Netherlands and India. A private preview of Azure will be available from new datacenters in Bangalore, India, starting next month, with Office 365 also in the pipeline, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president for Cloud and Enterprise. Deployments of Dynamics CRM Online will come in the first half of next year.

"Services from local datacenters will open infinite computing capacity for Indian government departments, banks, telecom companies and enterprises or all sizes," Guthrie said. "This will help make Digital India a reality."  

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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