Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure Availability Zones in its United Arab Emirates(UAE) datacenters in Dubai. The investment will enhance the competitiveness of UAE businesses through the vital provision of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. This reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to the UAE government, its business community, and its population.
Azure Availability Zones will build on the capabilities and benefits offered through Microsoft’s enterprise-grade datacenters in Dubai which began operations in June 2019. Organizations already using the zones in the UAE include Emirates Group, Commercial Bank of Dubai, and First Abu Dhabi Bank.
“With the advent of the always-on economy, uptime and continuous access to critical data, applications and workloads have become front-of-mind concerns for the region’s technology stakeholders,” said Naim Yazbeck, General Manager, Microsoft UAE.
“As businesses move forward amid increased industry upheavals and competition from market disrupters, competitiveness hinges on the ability to remain operational even as external issues destabilise markets and supply chains. Backups alone will not deliver such capabilities. Rapid recovery requires strategy-focused infrastructure and solutions to work effectively. That is what Azure Availability Zones delivers.”
Naim Yazbeck
Microsoft notes the launch of the zones shows its readiness to form the backbone of organizations’ futureproofing programs.
“The new availability zones will allow us to enhance the way we use Microsoft Cloud, says Srinivasan Sampath, Acting Group CTO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Offering us a greater level of data security, resilience and flexibility. Which in turn, will support our customer-centric ethos, and allow us to provide greater benefits for our clients.”
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Microsoft is announcing the addition of Availability Zones to the South Africa North cloud region. Expanding the region to have three unique physically separated locations within the region. To bring higher availability and asynchronous replication of applications and data for disaster recovery protection.
Microsoft says the Availability Zones give users additional options for high availability for their most demanding applications and services. As well as confidence and protection from potential hardware and software failures. By providing three or more unique physical locations within an Azure region.
These zones located in Johannesburg will each have their own power, cooling and high-speed low latency connections. Let’s say you are deploying a web tier consisting of 3 virtual machines, you can place one in each zone. So that if zone A fails your customers will still be able to access the other virtual machines in the other availability zones in the same Azure region. This is really ideal where data residency laws and regulatory requirements are important.
South Africa North is the only Azure cloud region in the Middle East and Africa to get availability zones presence. Microsoft will bring availability zones to the UAE North region and establish a new datacenter region in Israel this year.
Microsoft launched two cloud regions in Africa, South Africa North and West located in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. And two in the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Interestingly, when you check the Azure global infrastructure map it appears Microsoft is hiding certain regions. Regions it classifies as reserved access regions and this includes South Africa West and Abu Dhabi. Although these regions are available to customers, they will require you to go through a request process in order to gain access. The process to request access is straightforward and you can initiate it directly within the Azure portal.
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