Microsoft recently announced a new Azure region in North China. With this announcement, Microsoft now has five Azure regions in the China market, and it has doubled the capacity of cloud portfolio in China. Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform are available in China via 21Vianet. Along with the new cloud region, the following Azure services will be available in China this year.
- Azure availability zone
- Azure Arc
- Azure Purview
- Flexible Server deployment option for Azure Database for MySQL
What they are saying:
“We see fast-growing needs for global public cloud services in the China market, both from multi-national companies coming to China, Chinese companies seeking for global presence, and Chinese companies to digitally transform their businesses and processes on clouds—that’s the strong momentum driving us to keep expanding and upgrading our cloud services for almost eight years here in China,” said Dr. Hou Yang, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China Region (GCR).
BigTechWire’s take:
China is one the world’s fastest-growing public cloud market. Also, China’s digital economy is growing faster than most countries and it demands latest cloud services like Azure. Unfortunately, due to regulatory restrictions, most large Chinese companies depend on home grown cloud solutions from AliCloud, Huawei, Tencent and Baidu. In fact, both AWS and Azure are not in the top 3 public cloud providers list in China. Also, the relationship between China and the US is not so great these days. Any future sanctions (like what’s happening with Russia) will put Chinese companies dependent on US technology services under huge risk. It will be interesting to see Azure’s adoption in China in the coming months.
