On the same day that Amazon Web Services opened its London Region, Microsoft has revealed that it is now offering private internet connections to its UK data centres.
Microsoft, which announced the opening of its UK data centres on September 7th, is now unveiling the Azure ExpressRoute and PSN/N3 Connectivity feature.
The company says that since the company launched its Azure and Office 365 cloud offering in the UK, thousands of customers including the Ministry of Defence, the Met Police and parts of the NHS have signed up to take advantage of the sites – the main lure of which is UK data residency.
The new connectivity feature is said to allow customers that would like a hybrid option to manage their data both quickly and safety.
In addition to the services, Microsoft is also making available a second ExpressRoute location in the UK, Newport in Wales.
The company said that the second location will allow its Azure customers to, “benefit from path diversity for High Availability and Disaster Recovery in their country.”
Other new services from the company include Azure Security Centre, which is designed to help customers to prevent, detect and respond to threats by giving them visibility and control of their network.
Service Fabric lets developers spend more time focusing on building features for applications as they don’t need to design and write additional code to deal with reliability, scalability or latency.
The final addition is the Azure Marketplace, in essence an online store that features certified and open source applications, developer services and data.
In the near future Microsoft will be adding services such as Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup, while Dynamics 365 will become available through its UK data centres in the first half of 2017.
Cindy Rose, Microsoft’s UK chief executive, said: “With our trusted cloud now delivered locally, and our commitment to principles of security, privacy, transparency, compliance, and availability, we are well placed to support the digital transformation of organisations throughout the country.”
