
Microsoft has opened new Azure Availability Zones in Australia, having doubled its cloud capacity over the last two years.
According to Microsoft, Availability Zones provide additional options to improve resilience and high availability for organisations which are increasingly reliant on cloud services to run their business.
The additions, which come from the Australia East data centre region, will bring the local Azure availability zones up to three.
Microsoft said it had significantly increased the global capacity of Azure in the last six months as the coronavirus pandemic took hold across the world.
This, according to Microsoft, was done to “meet the needs of customers as they have transitioned to remote working, embraced online communication and collaboration, and supported more digital customer engagement”.
Customers such as Woolworths and the National Australia Bank (NAB) are already using the zones.
The five-year partnership will eventually result in NAB running 1,000 applications on Azure.
“Trust and resilience are critical for the financial services industry to meet both customer expectations and regulatory requirements,” said Steve Day, NAB executive for enterprise technology.
“The investment that Microsoft continues to make in its Azure Availability Zones provides us with the peace of mind that our systems and data will be protected.”