Microsoft says that their Canadian Cloud is open for Business

Microsoft announced that their Canadian datacentres are officially open to power even more businesses in Canada. With this announcement, Microsoft Azure is generally available from local datacentre regions located in Toronto and Quebec City, and Office 365 is now offering data residency for Canadian business customers.

Microsoft offers Canadian businesses and public sector customers the most complete cloud. The Microsoft Cloud is enterprise grade, hyperscale, with the highest standards of data security and privacy, all hosted locally in Canada.

This makes it possible for businesses that have been reticent – either due to nervousness about storing critical data and infrastructure outside of Canada, or because of strict data-residency regulations – to benefit from the enormous competitive advantages offered by of cloud solutions.

“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. “And, the Microsoft Cloud in Canada and across the globe features the same industry-leading levels of security, privacy and control, compliance and transparency.”

Many Canadian customers and partners are already powered by the Microsoft Cloud. These customers include Manulife Financial; one of Canadas leading financial services companies whose mandate is to provide forward thinking solutions to help people with their big financial decisions. 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.”

Today’s announcement in Canada brings the total number of generally available Azure regions to 24 globally, more than any other cloud provider, all backed by a $15 billion (USD) investment in global datacentre infrastructure. This enables customers like PCL, Canada’s largest contracting company, to have a unified infrastructure in all the countries they operate. The cloud has transformed their business and allows them to focus on innovation and enhanced efficiency rather than the backend process. The result is faster time to market, agility, and less operational overhead with over 80% cost savings since moving to Azure.