Two Microsoft data centers will open in Canada later this year according to The Globe and Mail. The Canadian government wanted to ensure that their data was kept in Canada, rather than being stored or moved between Microsoft’s many international data centers.
In some cases data being stored internationally is viewed as a positive. If data is stored internationally, private corporations can keep their data private, even from government requests. But in the case of governments, they understandably want to keep their data servers “in house.” The Canadian government also has data sovereignty rules to meet.
The president of Microsoft Canada Corp., Janet Kennedy told The Globe and Mail that in addition to government organizations, private businesses are interested in data centers within Canadian borders “It actually surprised me … some of them that had already done some cloud-based services with us were like ‘Oh, now that you’re in Canada, I can add this other group that we were holding back.’
The data centers will be located in Quebec and Toronto. The cloud is a quickly growing segment of Microsoft’s business and a strong foothold in enterprise. With past data center announcements it’s been common to state how many jobs will be created, but there was no such figure attached to this announcement.
Further reading: Canada, Cloud, Data centers, Microsoft
