Innovation News

Microsoft brings more cloud capabilities to Australia & NZ

Eliza Sayon Oct 18, 2022

2 min read

Microsoft is outlining additional cloud capabilities across Australia and New Zealand, continuing to transform business operations and accelerate the pace of innovation in the region.

The investments are said to include an upcoming availability of Azure Availability Zones (AZs) in the Melbourne and Auckland data centre regions to support additional services and higher reliability.

According to Microsoft, the AZs can make multi-regional architecture easier by providing infrastructure redundancy within a data centre region.

“By expanding our AZ capabilities to our Australia Southeast (Melbourne) and upcoming New Zealand North (Auckland) regions, customers will have multiple low latencies and high resiliency cloud locations, and more choices for managing their workloads in the Microsoft Cloud,” Microsoft’s statement reads.

Microsoft has launched an AZs in Sydney back in 2020, allowing their customers to distribute cloud resources across three physically separate locations in the Sydney metropolitan area.

The AZs is said to also help organisations better protect their applications and data from infrastructure risks such as technical software issues, hardware failures and natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and fires.

With Australia’s southeast region growing significantly, the AZs will further enhance their customer’s resilience from unexpected downtime or data loss.

Woolworths Head of Technology – Cloud, Reliability and Platform Engineering Ducas Francis welcomed the addition of new Availability Zones in Melbourne.

“The needs of our business and our customers are constantly changing, which requires Woolworths’ technology infrastructure to be scalable, agile and resilient,” he said.

“Microsoft’s new Azure Availability Zones in the Australia Southeast region will further support our efforts to innovate in the cloud and simplify work for our teams in order to deliver exceptional customer experiences across our network of stores and online channels.”

The National Australia Bank (NAB) will also benefit from additional cloud resiliency offerings in Melbourne as it delivers its multi-cloud strategy.

“Resilience is the foundation of everything we do in technology, underpinning our ability to provide our customers with great banking experiences,” NAB Chief Technology Officer Steve Day said.

“Microsoft’s investment in additional Azure Availability Zones in Melbourne will enable us to deploy critical applications into the Australia Southeast region.”

The expanded scale and services of Microsoft’s cloud offerings in Australia and New Zealand are made possible by a close partnership with several data centre providers and Microsoft’s datacenter construction efforts.

Source: Microsoft media release. Content has been edited for style and length.

Eliza Sayon

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Eliza is a content producer and editor at Public Spectrum. She is an experienced writer on topics related to the government and to the public, as well as stories that uplift and improve the community.