Azure global infrastructure
60+ regions, more than any other cloud provider
Discover a new world of sustainable, trusted cloud infrastructure with Azure
Safeguard your data with the trusted cloud
Take advantage of multi-layered security across physical datacentres, infrastructure, and operations with Azure. Help protect your business assets and data with industry-leading physical security systems and a comprehensive portfolio of compliance offerings and privacy standards.
Achieve your sustainability goals
Using Microsoft Azure is up to 98 percent more carbon efficient than using a traditional enterprise datacentre. Join the growing community of industry leaders that are reducing energy use and transitioning to a more carbon-neutral grid with Azure.
Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012 and is committed to being carbon negative by 2030, with the commitment by 2050 to remove all the carbon it's directly emitted since its founding in 1975. Take advantage of the lessons learnt from Microsoft's own sustainability journey and help advance a low-carbon future—while you achieve your own sustainability goals.
Run mission-critical systems with confidence
Azure provides enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure on which customers and partners can rely. This includes physical elements like redundant power, networking, and cooling, as well as software elements like safe deployment processes, impact-less maintenance, and failure prediction enabled by machine learning.
No matter what your service level objectives are, Azure empowers you to achieve your organisation's reliability goals. Take advantage of built-in features that help you design and operate mission-critical systems with confidence—across high availability, disaster recovery, and back up scenarios.
Embrace the infrastructure of tomorrow
Learn how Microsoft is improving the performance, efficiency, power consumption, and costs of Azure datacentres for your cloud workloads—with infrastructure innovations such as underwater datacentres, liquid immersion cooling projects, and hydrogen fuel cell technologies.
In order for others to benefit from these innovations, Azure shares server and data-centre infrastructure designs, emphasising security and standardisation, as part of the Open Compute Project—promoting a vibrant industry ecosystem for global data-centre deployment in the cloud.
Guide to Azure global infrastructure terms
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Azure global infrastructure is made up of two key components—physical infrastructure and connective network components. The physical component is comprised of 200+ physical datacentres, arranged into regions, and linked by one of the largest interconnected networks on the planet.
With the connectivity of the global Azure network, each of the Azure datacentres provides high availability, low latency, scalability, and the latest advancements in cloud infrastructure—all running on the Azure platform.
Together, these components keep data entirely within the trusted Microsoft network and IP traffic never enters the public internet.
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Azure datacentres are unique physical buildings—located all over the globe—that house a group of networked computer servers.
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An Azure region is a set of datacentres, deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
With more global regions than any other cloud provider, Azure gives customers the flexibility to deploy applications where they need. An Azure region has discrete pricing and service availability.
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An Azure geography is a discrete market, typically containing at least one or more regions, that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries. Geographies allow customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close. Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to the dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure of Azure.
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Azure Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region and offer high availability to protect your applications and data from datacentre failures. Each zone is made up of one or more datacentres equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.
The physical separation of availability zones within a region protects apps and data from facility-level issues. Zone-redundant services replicate your apps and data across Azure Availability Zones to protect from single points of failure.
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The Azure global network refers to all of the components in networking and is comprised of the Microsoft global wide-area network (WAN), points of presence (PoPs), fibre, and others.
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Azure Edge Zones are footprint extensions of Azure, placed in densely populated areas. Azure Edge Zones support virtual machines (VMs), containers, and a select set of Azure services that let you run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive apps close to your end users.
Azure Edge Zones are part of the Microsoft global network and offer secure, reliable, and high-bandwidth connectivity between apps—running at the Azure Edge Zone (close to the user), and the full set of Azure services running across the larger Azure regions.
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Azure Space is a strategic initiative that extends the utility of Azure capabilities through the power of space infrastructure. It was created to be the platform and ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of the space community. Azure Space makes connectivity and compute increasingly attainable across industries, including agriculture, energy, telecommunications, and government.
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Azure Orbital is part of Azure Space strategic initiative.. It provides a fully managed earth station service that enables customers to communicate, downlink, and process data from their satellites or spacecrafts on a pay-as-you-go basis—without needing to build their own satellite earth stations.
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The Microsoft global wide-area network (WAN) connects hundreds of datacentres in regions around the world and offers high availability and capacity. With the flexibility to immediately respond to unpredictable demand spikes, the global WAN is critical in delivering a great cloud service experience.
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An Azure point of presence, often abbreviated as PoP, is an access point or physical location where traffic can enter or exit the Microsoft global network.
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Regional network gateways are massively parallel, hyperscale datacentre interconnects between datacentres within a region—without the need to network each individual data-centre to the others in a region.
This ensures that connection issues in one data-centre don’t cause issues for the wider region. This also allows the addition of new datacentres without the need to route direct network connections to each existing data-centre.
Innovate anywhere, from underwater to outer space
Create next-generation solutions and deploy them anywhere—on or off the planet
Improve performance with less latency
Learn how Azure and its global network infrastructure are investing in fast, distributed infrastructure to virtually eliminate latency concerns—one of the main performance barriers for modern apps, connected devices, and mobile services.
Explore ultra-low-latency access for your large data and connectivity requirements with Azure Edge Zones—providing compute, storage, and services such as containers at the edge.