The cloud landscape is constantly changing, with new innovations, challenges, and opportunities emerging every day. To stay ahead of the curve and deliver the best value to your business, you need a cloud platform that is scalable and adaptable to your unique requirements. You need a cloud platform that lets you grow seamlessly, reach new markets, leverage the latest technologies and the most competitive pricing in an ever-changing digital landscape. You need Microsoft Azure.
At Microsoft, we want to empower you to build and run your applications and data with the highest performance, availability, and security possible. That’s why we are growing our global footprint and also diversifying our Azure regions within each country or continent. We want to give you more choice, flexibility, and resiliency for your cloud solutions, and we encourage you to take advantage of these benefits by adopting a multi-region growth strategy.
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Why adopt a multi-region growth strategy?
Multi-region means that you can access Azure services, resources, and capacity across a broader set of geographic areas rather than relying on a single location. Once a multi-region approach is factored into your deployment architecture it will provide several advantages, such as:
- Scalability and flexibility: You can accommodate your changing and growing cloud needs by choosing from a wide range of offerings across the Azure region portfolio, including lower pricing, a reduced carbon footprint, advanced AI capabilities, and increased deployment options. Additionally, you can customize your cloud solutions by selecting the best fit for your workloads and scenarios.
- Resilience and availability: You can reduce the impact of service disruptions or data loss due to catastrophic events impacting an entire region, such as natural disasters, by having multiple backup and recovery options across different regions. You can also enjoy higher SLAs and more peace of mind.
- Performance and reduced latency: You can deliver faster and more responsive services by having your data and applications closer to you and your users. This is especially important for latency-sensitive applications such as gaming, streaming, or e-commerce. You can also benefit from the best possible connectivity and bandwidth through our optimized network routing and peering options.
We are able to provide you with these advantages through our continued investment in multiple regions to overcome the increasing challenges we see across the industry such as stricter government policies, regulatory compliance, environmental impact, and geopolitical risks. With expansion of our global infrastructure, for example our datacenter region announcements in Europe, we can ensure that we are always ready and able to meet your cloud demands responsibly and sustainably.
That’s why we continue to build Azure as the world’s computer. We are committed to meet you where and when you need us to provide the most comprehensive and diverse cloud infrastructure in the industry.
How Azure regions can help you achieve your cloud goals
As a customer, you want to leverage the full potential of the cloud to transform your business, innovate faster, and deliver better experiences for your end users and customers. However, you also want to have control over where your data and applications reside, how they are protected, and how they perform. That’s why Azure regions are so important.
Azure has more regions than any other cloud provider, with more than 60 datacenter regions across 35 countries. This means you have more options than ever before for your data and applications, based on your business needs, compliance requirements, and customer preferences. By embracing agility, flexibility, and investing in new ways of building cloud solutions to take advantage of global infrastructure investments across the globe, you can not only future proof the growth strategy of your business, but maintain a leading edge in this fast, dynamically changing cloud landscape.
Microsoft continues to expand global and local infrastructure in response to growing demand and to support our customers’ limitless innovation with scalable and resilient infrastructure. When identifying datacenter sites, Microsoft considers a variety of criteria including (but not limited to) customer demand, access to sustainable and reliable power, high-capacity network connections, and skilled labor to determine the long-term viability of each region. Our extensive portfolio of datacenter regions gives you the ability to scale your workloads across regions, improve resiliency, and bring your applications closer to your end users.
How to adopt a multi-region cloud strategy with Azure
The Cloud Adoption Framework is proven guidance that’s designed to help you create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary for your organization to succeed in the cloud. It provides proven practices, documentation, and tools that cloud architects, IT professionals, and decision makers need to successfully achieve their short and long-term objectives. For organizations that are currently running their workloads from an Azure region, new workloads can be built in any of our Azure regions to leverage the specific benefits such as reduced carbon footprint, more competitive pricing, or advanced AI capabilities.
You can also find more information on how to design and deploy your cloud solutions across multiple Azure regions in the following articles and design areas from the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Well-Architected Framework:
- Plan: Choose the right Azure regions for your landing zone based on your business needs and compliance requirements.
- Implement: Design and deploy a network topology, security and resources that connects your landing zone regions and supports high availability and scalability.
- Modify an Azure landing zone architecture to meet requirements across multiple locations.
- Networking topology and connectivity.
- Resource organization.
- Identity and access management.
- Announcing zone redundancy and multi-region capabilities in Azure landing zones.
- Optimize: Manage and organize your resources across regions, and apply best practices for identity, security, reliability, cost, and performance.
Leverage Azure as a cloud platform, not a datacenter region. We believe designing for a multi-region architecture is the future of cloud computing and we are proud to be a leader in this space. We continue to grow our global infrastructure to meet the demand for cloud services and remain committed to growing responsibly. Providing secure, resilient, and sustainable options for you around the globe.
