Microsoft Cloud Germany is now offering Azure as a new datacenter partnership model for the first time in Europe. This latest development is a huge achievement for the Microsoft Azure team and was the outcome of work based largely on European enterprise customers’ feedback.
Microsoft Cloud services are already available throughout Europe, but this is the first time that Microsoft Cloud Germany provides a different cloud option for partners and customers in Germany, the remaining members of the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
An independent company in Germany, T-Systems International (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) is a data trustee that manages Microsoft’s customer data in new datacenters in Magdeburg and Frankfurt. Including Germany, Microsoft plans to add Azure in 34 more regions, in addition to the already 30 regions where Azure is available, around the globe. At the moment, Microsoft is the world’s leading cloud provider.
Here is a look at how Microsoft Cloud Germany will use new Azure datacenter partnership model to help Germany’s economy and business infrastructure.
- For businesses, including automotive, healthcare and construction that rely on SAP enterprise applications, SAP HANA is now certified to run in production on Azure, which will simplify infrastructure management, improve time to market and lower costs. Specifically, customers and partners can now take the advantage of storing and processing their most sensitive data.
- Addressing the global scale of IoT while ensuring data resides in-country, Azure IoT Suite enables businesses, including the robust industrial and manufacturing sector in Germany, to adopt the latest cloud and IoT solutions. Azure IoT Suite enables enterprises to quickly get started connecting their devices and assets, uncovering actionable intelligence and ultimately modernizing their business.
- With Industry 4.0-compatible integration of OPC Unified Architecture into Azure IoT Suite, customers and partners can connect their existing machines to Azure for sending telemetry data for analysis to the cloud and for sending commands to their machines from the cloud (i.e. control them from anywhere in the world) without making any changes to their machines or infrastructure, including firewall settings.
- Microsoft, and particularly Azure, has been a significant and growing contributor to open source projects supporting numerous open source programming models, libraries and Linux distributions. Startups, independent software vendors and partners can take advantage of a robust open source ecosystem including Linux environments, Web/LAMP implementations and e-commerce PaaS solutions from partners.
- Furthermore, with the open source .NET Standard reference stack and sample applications Microsoft has recently contributed to the OPC Foundation’s GitHub, customers and partners can quickly create and save money maintaining cross-platform OPC UA applications, which easily connect to the cloud via the OPC Publisher samples available for .NET, .NET Standard, Java and ANSI-C.
- Azure ExpressRoute provides enterprise customers with the option of private connectivity to our German cloud. It offers greater reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and more predictable performance than typical internet connections and is delivered in partnership with a number of the leading network service providers including Colt Telekom, e-Shelter, Equinix, Interxion and T-Systems International.
Learn more about Microsoft Cloud Germany’s partners, customers, and services through Microsoft Azure Germany.
