Microsoft launches Azure Availability Zones

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Availability Zones, which will be provided through its UAE data centers in Dubai. The investment, which aims to improve the competitiveness of UAE businesses by providing critical business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to the UAE government, business community, and population. 

“With the advent of the always-on economy, uptime and continuous access to critical data, applications and workloads have become front-of-mind concerns for the region’s technology stakeholders,” said Naim Yazbeck, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. “As businesses move forward amid increased industry upheavals and competition from market disrupters, competitiveness hinges on the ability to remain operational even as external issues destabilise markets and supply chains. Backups alone will not deliver such capabilities. Rapid recovery requires strategy-focused infrastructure and solutions to work effectively. That is what Azure Availability Zones delivers.”

Azure Availability Zones are an important component of a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. Through advanced architecture and built-in, end-to-end security, it is intended to ensure the resilience and availability of business-critical applications and data in times of crisis.

The introduction of Azure Availability Zones also demonstrates Microsoft’s readiness for its UAE cloud locations to serve as the backbone of organizations’ futureproofing efforts in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic crisis.

Azure Availability Zones will expand on the capabilities and benefits provided by Microsoft’s enterprise-grade data centers in Dubai, which opened in June 2019. The services provided by the facilities have enabled several organizations to expand their capacities and reimagine their operations. Emirates Group, Commercial Bank of Dubai, Mashreq Bank, and First Abu Dhabi Bank are among those that have already migrated to Microsoft Azure Availability Zones in the UAE. 

“As an organisation, we believe in the power of technology to deliver a smarter and more agile customer experience as well as enable our people to be dynamic and remain ahead of developments in our industry. The new availability zones will allow us to enhance the way we use Microsoft Cloud, offering us a greater level of data security, resilience and flexibility, which in turn, will support our customer-centric ethos, and allow us to provide greater benefits for our clients,” commented Srinivasan Sampath, Acting Group Chief Technology Officer – First Abu Dhabi Bank.

“The intelligent, trusted, versatile Microsoft Cloud has been the foundation of digital transformation for regional innovators for more than three years now,” Yazbeck added. “Business agility, cost rationalisation, productivity, security, governance, and compliance are just some of the benefits that have been experiences by our regional cloud customers. Now that Availability Zones has been opened up to the region, we expect to see swift uptake as customers seek to protect the considerable progress they have made.”