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Microsoft Cloud now delivered from Canada

With this announcement, Microsoft Azure is generally available from local data centre regions located in Toronto and Quebec City, and Office 365 is now offering data residency for Canadian business customers.

Azure and Office 365 customers gain the benefits of Microsoft’s trusted cloud services combined with data residency in Canada. This includes data redundancy in multiple locations within Canada for business continuity and the option of a fast and private connection to the cloud with Azure ExpressRoute.

“Our goal is to deliver Canada’s most trusted and complete cloud to power Canadian businesses and governments and ultimately enable them to achieve greater impact. By offering fully integrated cloud services, we create simple, cost-effective solutions that empower our customers,” said Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada.

Many Canadian customers and partners are already powered by the Microsoft Cloud. These customers include Manulife Financial. They describe their move to the Microsoft Cloud as follows: “Moving our high performance computing needs to Microsoft Azure has not only given us access to a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure environment, it has significantly reduced our peak quarter end processing times and reduced our fixed operating costs by over 30% since we now only pay for what we use.”

Microsoft is a global leader in compliance, with the broadest portfolio of certifications in the industry. John Hewie, National Security Officer, Microsoft Canada, says: “In Canada, many of our public sector customers and partners are finding that a standards-based approach to cloud compliance helps organizations more cost-effectively meet evolving compliance requirements.”
This focus on compliance together with local residency has resulted in many public sector customers moving to the Microsoft cloud in Canada including the Province of Nova Scotia, Province of New Brunswick, City of Regina and the City of Brampton.

The Canadian announcement brings the total number of generally available Azure regions to 24 globally, all backed by a US$15-billion investment in global data centre infrastructure. This enables customers like PCL, a contracting company, to have a unified infrastructure in all the countries they operate. According to Microsoft, the cloud has transformed PCL’s business and allows the company to focus on innovation and enhanced efficiency rather than the backend process.

Microsoft also announced an expansion of its ExpressRoute offerings in Canada. “With so much momentum in the cloud, we are thrilled to welcome Bell Canada as the first Canadian telecommunications partner for Azure ExpressRoute,” said Janet Kennedy.

With the expansion, Canadian customers now have the option to create private connections to the Microsoft cloud. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds and lower latencies than typical internet connections.