Microsoft opens UK Azure Datacentres

Microsoft is first but the customer is ultimately the winner.

Microsoft has today (07/09/16) announced the launch of its first UK Azure datacentres. This is big news for the cloud and bigger news for databases.

Until now, UK companies only had access to two European locations (Ireland and Netherlands) from Microsoft and with the Azure datacentres opening in the south and west of England, there’s a lot to get excited about. In essence, the openings will deliver two key benefits for UK businesses:

• Data Sovereignty: the concept that information which has been converted and stored in digital form is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located.
• Data Latency: the time it takes for data to be stored or retrieved.

This is transformational for data in the cloud. It removes the last 2 key obstacles for moving data and databases to the cloud.

Companies processes high volumes of transactional data through SQL Server are most likely to capitalise from the new UK data centres early on, predominantly those in Retail, Finance and Travel sectors. It’s these companies we expect to see quick re-evaluation of IT projects and process, more specifically those around ‘as-a-service’ initiatives and in particular those of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).

DBaaS and DaaS have already seen rapid UK growth in the last 3 to 5 years, not only with Azure but also that of AWS and Oracle Cloud. For those within the data management /database industry, will know we are currently witnessing the ‘Cloud Wars’ between major IT vendors - which is enabling digital transformation at an unprecedented rate.

Companies are now able to leverage the benefits of cloud compute at a fraction of the price when compared to on-premise, plus it comes the additional benefits of having data on demand - delivering better customer experiences.

Dev Nayak, co-founder and managing director of dsp stated:

“This is a real game changer for businesses in the UK. All of our customers want to go the cloud but some have concerns about security, sovereignty and speed if their data won’t be stored in the UK. Now Microsoft have opened their UK Azure datacentres this has put those concerns to bed.  I believe this will be a major catalyst for migrating databases, and not just SQL Server to the cloud. Expect AWS and Oracle to follow very soon.”.

One of the biggest issues companies face after moving their data to the cloud, is how the data will be supported. One of the best ways to address this is through Continuous Maintenance; a pipeline-of-change. It’s perfect for the life-cycle management of mission-critical databases and application environments; facilitating the automated patching and testing of applications in pre-production environments before releasing the changes into production.