Microsoft’s cloud offers data residency in Canada

TORONTO – Microsoft Canada announced that the Microsoft Cloud is now officially available using datacenters based in Toronto and Quebec City. The offerings include the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which supports a wide variety of programming languages, tools and frameworks, and the Office 365 suite of productivity apps and programs.

In addition, Dynamics CRM Online is scheduled to go live by September 2016 to bring the most complete cloud, Microsoft said, with leadership across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and hybrid scenarios.

With the availability of data centres in Canada, Microsoft’s highly secure, enterprise grade, hyper-scale cloud provides data residency in Canada. This includes data redundancy in multiple locations within Canada for business continuity and the option of a fast and private connection to the cloud with Azure ExpressRoute.

“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,” said Janet Kennedy (pictured), president of Microsoft Canada.

“By offering fully integrated cloud services, we create simple, cost-effective solutions that empower our customers. 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.”

For Stratiform, a Canadian cloud-based solution provider, the Microsoft cloud enables them to respond to their customers evolving business needs. “The announcement of Microsoft’s new Canadian data centres provides a tremendous opportunity for us to grow our Canadian customer base,” said Justin Kurtenback, principal consultant, Stratiform.

“The cloud enables businesses to push innovation and drive business transformation, and the new Microsoft Cloud in Canada removes a vital barrier that has prevented us from working with major sectors of the Canadian market and broaden our offering for international companies.”

Microsoft is a global leader in compliance, with the broadest portfolio of certifications in the industry. John Hewie, national security officer, Microsoft Canada, says: “In Canada, many of our public sector customers and partners are finding that a standards-based approach to cloud compliance helps organizations more cost-effectively meet evolving compliance requirements.”

This focus on compliance together with local residency has resulted in many public sector customers moving to the Microsoft cloud in Canada including the Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the City of Regina and the City of Brampton.

“Working with Microsoft is a tremendous opportunity for Nova Scotia. We encourage innovation and we are excited to be taking advantage of the newly opened Microsoft Canadian data-centre, where we will begin moving more than 35,000 users to the Microsoft Canadian cloud over the coming years. Nova Scotia continues to be an innovative leader in Canada in many areas and this solution supports this visionary type of thinking,” said Labi Kousoulis, Minister Internal Services, Province of Nova Scotia.

The Microsoft 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 data-centre 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.

Microsoft also announced an expansion of its ExpressRoute offerings in Canada. “With so much momentum in the cloud, we are thrilled to welcome Bell Canada as the first Canadian telecommunications partner for Azure ExpressRoute,” said Ms. Kennedy.

With the expansion, Canadian customers now have the option to create private connections to the Microsoft cloud. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds and lower latencies than typical internet connections.

About Microsoft Canada
Established in 1985, Microsoft Canada Inc. is the Canadian subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq “MSFT”) the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft Canada provides nationwide sales, marketing, consulting and local support services in both French and English. Headquartered in Mississauga, Microsoft Canada has nine regional offices across the country dedicated to empowering people through great software – any time, any place and on any device. For more information on Microsoft Canada, please visit www.microsoft.ca.