MoD inks UK Azure data centre deal with Microsoft, closes brolly, ducks inside

Microsoft to open three cloudy regions in London, Cardiff, and Durham.

Tom Mendelsohn – Sep 7, 2016 11:45 am | 2

Credit: BBC

Microsoft has opened a bunch of data centres in the UK, allowing British Azure and Office 365 customers to access their data locally for the first time. Microsoft Dynamics CRM will follow suit in the first half of 2017.

With Amazon and Google preparing UK cloud data centres of their own, Microsoft claimed on Wednesday morning that it had mowed their lawn.

Microsoft has opened two data regions for Azure, with the UK South region located in London, and UK West region found in Cardiff, Wales. An Office 365 region, meanwhile, is supported by data centres in London and Durham, though Microsoft would not say how many data centres make up each region.

They will pick up traffic which previously went through data centres in Ireland and the Netherlands. Localisation helps cloudy firms cut latency times and customers comply more easily with local laws.

Microsoft, which is embroiled in a major legal battle with the US government over secret requests from law enforcement to access customer data, has diversified its cloud regions, partly in the hope of dodging such requests.

The Ministry of Defence and the South London and Maudsley NHS trust are among the first to sign up.

“The MoD, which employs more than 230,000 people and currently spends over £3 billion on its infrastructure every year, will use Office 365 and Azure, citing both value and security as key reasons to use the Microsoft Cloud,” boasted Redmond cloud veep Takeshi Numoto in a blog post.

Seemingly, the change hasn’t come before time; the MoD’s chief information officer Mike Stone admitted to the BBC that its software had not been updated in quite a few years.

“We were still on Windows XP, for instance, and all of the applications were from 2003 or prior to that,” he said. “I took the view that the services we were providing were unfit for purpose. The idea is to provide a different capability that fully exploits the power of the cloud and mobility. We can now work on documents collaboratively and understand more about the ways we are working—we will be able to see how much time teams are spending in meetings, on email and on the phone.”

Stone, who first asked Microsoft to open local data centres two years ago, said that the MoD wasn’t willing to store its “classified” data on a service based outside of the UK, but was pretty comfortable with a local cloudy offering.

“Even though legally, we can keep all of our data anywhere in the European Union, when it came to defence information, it did not feel right to me that it was stored outside the UK,” he told the BBC. “That’s why I asked [Microsoft’s chief executive] Satya Nadella to come.”

Financial terms between Microsoft and the MoD and South London and Maudsley NHS trust weren’t revealed.