Microsoft to offer commercial cloud services from local data centers by 2015

Microsoft announces commercial cloud services from the local data centre with the objective of delivering benefits from lower latency, Geo redundancy and data sovereignty with local infrastructure by the end of year 2015. Satya Nadella’s maiden visit to India as the CEO of Microsoft had some good news in the waiting. The CEO announced offering commercial cloud services viz. Azure and Office 365. This will help accelerate both public and hybrid cloud adoption considerably in the country. Data sovereignty will benefit organisations in India to a great extent, so will geo redundancy and lower latency due to accessibility of local infrastructure.

Revealing more about commercial cloud services, Satya Nadella said that Microsoft remains committed to help people as well as organisations succeed in their mobile-first and cloud-first world. This is the reason the company is proud to provide commercial cloud service via data centres in India. He further said that more than 250 million people in the country use internet connected devices. Microsoft cloud services will therefore have incredible demand in India.

Bhaskar Pramanik, the Chairman of Microsoft India said that with the availability of cloud services through local data centres, the company will be able to achieve the dream of Digital India. With this, new possibilities will open up in healthcare, education, financial inclusion as well as e-governance. This will ultimately help the company influence the lives of a billion people.

Cloud services by Microsoft in India have grown beyond 100 percent in terms of revenue in the last year. This will be further accelerated by the commitment to provide locally hosted both Microsoft Azure as well as Office 365. The locally available cloud services by the company will result in many opportunities for adopting public cloud to several sectors like banking, insurance companies, financial services in addition to state owned companies and government departments as well. The services that are provided through local data centres will ultimately create novel avenues for the 10,000+ partner ecosystem of Microsoft India that comprises holsters, system integrators and independent software vendors as well as others.

Steering Growth in Business

Microsoft cloud technologies have been adopted by many key clientele including Bajaj Finance, FCB/ULKA, Fortis Hospitals and others and they have already benefitted from the same.

Rakesh Bhatt, COO, Bajaj Finance Limited said that Microsoft is positioned uniquely for addressing the booming information technology needs of the finance industry for not only productivity but also platform solutions. Bajaj Finance Limited has experienced the level of quality of the Microsoft Cloud Services and is satisfied with the same. The extent of Microsoft Cloud Solutions, right from on-premise private cloud to the public and hybrid cloud comprise comprehensive offering for financial services’ customers.

The commercial cloud services will be delivered through the local data centre of Microsoft. This will ultimately benefit both small and medium businesses in India by gaining rapid growth, which can adopt either public or hybrid cloud offerings from Microsoft. With the objective of enabling the same, the company also announced an all-new Cloud Accelerator Program for supporting customers at various stages of adoption.