Azure Coming to Australia
With the advancements of the “Cloud” a lot has changed in the IT world. A world where you can now have all your full computing requirements catered for by a server that’s set up in no time and hosted in a Data Centre. As compared to a few years ago where you would need to spend thousands of dollars on servers and its associated set up costs. Not to mention a lengthy set up process.
With the Cloud, applications that work of a database can be easily centralised and access available from any device with sufficient connectivity to the database. Whether it be over the internet at work, or on your smart phone.
MEX is such a system and over the last couple of years we have seen a big shift in the need for Cloud Hosting services from our customers. With more and more customers jumping onto our existing MEX Data Hosting plan (one that is fully hosted in Australia).
Having all their access guaranteed by our hosting service, as well as constant backups and Disaster Recovery requirements catered for.
We like to keep up to date with the latest developments on the Cloud front and are excited by the news that next month will mark the arrival of the long awaited Azure Cloud Computing facilities in Australia. The announcement was made at the recent Microsoft Partner Conference held on the Gold Coast that MEX’s Product manager Matt Calcutt attended.
At the conference Microsoft announced that they will be setting up two facilities in Australia come October. One in New South Wales and the other in Victoria.
Here’s a snippet of the Azure developments taken from the Microsoft Azure website:
Azure operates out of 15 regions around the world, and we’ve announced plans for 2 new regions in Australia later this year. Geographic expansion is a priority for Azure because it enables our customers to achieve higher performance and it supports their requirements and preferences regarding data location.
Here’s some of what Microsoft’s Toby Towers (Head of Server and Tools Group Australia) had to say
"These two locations will be geo-redundant, offering our customers the ability to back up their data across two separate locations, both within Australia,"
"We know that providing disaster recovery, while ensuring data sovereignty goals are met, is critical to many of our customers, and we look forward to delivering a solution that meets those requirements."
For years Azure’s Australian based users looking for cloud hosting options had to resort to having their Cloud hosting from overseas data centres. Although this proved efficient, certain factors such as the knowledge of having your data hosted within the country and bound to local laws as opposed to having it in an Asian data centre. Locality of the data will also play a big role in improving things like access and performance.
As cloud hosting becomes more and more a part of our lives, this development will surely be taken up well. With Virtual Machines, Web Hosting, SQL and other Microsoft products and services all now locally hosted.
For more information on this news check out http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/