“Built on Microsoft’s Trusted Cloud principles of security, privacy, compliance, transparency and availability, this creates new opportunities for innovation, with the intent to spark local economic growth for Microsoft UK’s 25,000-plus partners and support local technology advancement”, it added. It operates more than 100 data centres globally.
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From today Azure and Office will now be generally available from three data centre locations in London, Cardiff and Durham.
The MoD will be using Office 365 and Azure for computing purposes rather than the legacy internal servers and Microsoft software which has been in use since 2005.
The British data centres aren’t directly connected with the UK’s exit from the European Union, with the MoD having approached Microsoft about the project two years ago, but the shift could spur more UK-based infrastructure, industry observers have suggested.
Both organizations notably hold sensitive information, which illustrates why Microsoft is investing in the new regions that of course also will be able to serve London’s massive financial services industry.
The new Microsoft data centers already have their first customers, including the UK’s Ministry of Defense.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD), which employs around 250,000 people, will use Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure cloud services, with the Government citing value for money and security as key reasons for the agreement.
He said: “We were still on Windows XP, for instance, and all of the applications were from 2003 or prior to that”. Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest cloud provider, is expecting to launch its first data center in the United Kingdom by early next year, and Google, which is on a mission to prove that it can be a serious competitor to both AWS and Microsoft, hasn’t publicly voiced plans to launch a data center there. Cloud providers are being asked to confirm that data will not be placed in jurisdictions with different compliance and data protection requirements.
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Microsoft is breaking into the UK’s public sector through its other new clients as well, which include the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust that aims to improve how mental health specialists handle work outside of hospitals; Capita, which will utilise Azure to run online tools for social workers and Careflow Connect, which will allow healthcare professionals to chat with one another without their patient-related messages leaving the UK. Customers have the option of hosting data locally or elsewhere on the Microsoft network.
