Microsoft Cloud Open for Business in Canada

Microsoft Canada has announced that Microsoft Azure is now generally available in Canada from local datacenter regions in Toronto and Quebec City. In addition, Office 365 is now offering data residency for Canadian business customers and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is set to go live by September of this year.

This announcement brings the total number of generally available Azure regions to 24 globally, all backed by Microsoft's $15 billion investment in a global datacenter infrastructure, company officials said. The announcement comes fast on the heels of a similar announcement for India in early May, and for Japan in November, 2015.

Now Canadian customers can use Azure and Office 365 and keep their enterprise data in Canada. Among the benefits is data redundancy in a number of Canadian locations, which ensures business continuity as well as the option to have fast and private connection to the cloud via Azure ExpressRoute, according to company officials. The ExpressRoute offerings in Canada allow firms to establish private connections to Azure services with reduced data latency compared to typical Internet connections. Finally, in-country enterprise data storage is compliant with Canadian federal regulations.

"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. By offering fully integrated cloud services, we create simple, cost-effective solutions that empower our customers." wrote Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada, in a statement.

Microsoft Canada's national security officer, John Hewie, stated that a standards-based approach to cloud compliance is helping customers and partners more cost-effectively meet evolving compliance requirements.

Because of this focus on compliance as well as ...