Azure datacenters
The Azure Platform is supported by a growing network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Microsoft has decades of experience running services such as Bing, Office 365, and outlook.com. Azure is available in 140 countries, including China, and has invested in offerings specifically for US Government and Germany. Azure supports 17 languages and 24 currencies, all backed by Microsoft's $15 billion (USD) investment in global datacenter infrastructure. Azure is continuously investing in the latest infrastructure technologies, with a focus on high reliability, operational excellence, cost-effectiveness, environmental sustainability, and a trustworthy online experience for customers and partners worldwide.
Global presence
Azure maintains a global presence to help customers and partners meet their goal of providing applications close to their user base. Storage of data can be restricted to a single geography, region, or country.
Redundancy and recovery
Azure users can leverage a global network of datacenters to maintain availability in a cost-effective manner. Two data replication options can be enabled during initial sign-up.
With Locally Redundant Storage (LRS), data is stored locally within the users' primary region. With Geo Redundant Storage (GRS), data is stored in a secondary region 250+ miles from the primary region but within the same geography.
Environmental sustainability
Microsoft is committed to driving software and technology innovations that help people and organizations improve the environment. Its goal is to reduce the impact of our operations and products, help other organizations reduce their impact, and to help drive dynamic industry best practices for environmental sustainability. Microsoft achieved Carbon Neutrailty in 2014 and achieved our goal that all new datacenters have an average 1.125 Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which is one-third less than the industry average datacenter PUE of 1.7.
Azure in China
Azure is now available in China through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet, one of the country’s largest Internet providers. Operated and sold by 21Vianet, Azure brings Microsoft’s reliable, flexible, and economical cloud computing technologies to customers there while propelling technological development forward. Microsoft is the first global company to make public cloud services available in the country.