Microsoft Expands Azure Data Centers To France, Launches Trust Offensive vs AWS, Google (thestack.com)

Microsoft announced on Monday that it plans to build its first Azure data center in France this year as part of its $3 billion investment for building cloud services in Europe. The company today also launched a new publication dubbed, Cloud for Global Good with no fewer than 78 public policy recommendations in 15 categories such as data protection and accessibility issues. TechCrunch adds:The new expansion, investment and "trust" initiative were revealed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was speaking at an event in Dublin, Ireland. He said that the expansion would mean that Microsoft covers "more regions than any other cloud provider... In the last year the capacity has more than doubled." As a measure of how Microsoft and Amazon are intent on levelling each other on service availability right now, the news of the French data center comes one month after Amazon announced that it would also be building a data center in France. Nadella, of course, did not mention AWS by name but that is the big elephant in the room for Microsoft. Nadella said today that Microsoft has data centers covering 30 regions across the globe, "more regions than any other cloud provider," with the European footprint including Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella, currently on a whirlwind tour of Europe, says that Microsoft has now invested over $3 billion in cloud infrastructure in Europe, and will extend that to governance-friendly French data centers in 2017. The company has also released a new publication calling for 78 policy reviews in 15 sectors of Cloud, including an overhaul of the verbose and opaque way that end-users are required to click legal agreements over data, some of which are specious and others of which are critical: "Because data is now collected and used in so many different ways, people can be overwhelmed if constantly presented with privacy choices and requests to consent to data collection. Requiring express consent in every situation could also make it difficult to understand which situations raise serious privacy implications and which are trivial."

Comments

Trust offensive

[OneHundredAndTen]

Most fitting: Microsoft is offensive vis-a-vis anything and everything to do with trust.

The last mover disadavantage

[HBI]

Why does Microsoft insist on trying to catch up in sectors where vendor lock-in is already apparent? Trying to translate your AWS applications to what Microsoft has in Azure is hard, as hard as a Windows to Linux transition was 10 years ago.

This feels like Zune or Windows Phone writ large.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[HBI]

I'm not entirely convinced the move is inevitable.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[kbonin]

This is, like almost all of Microsoft's public announcements, a marketing move. They're trying to convince the millions of straggling PHBs to move to Azure instead of AWS. This effort spans many fronts, including back room short-term discounts on Azure pricing, EA/SA licensing, Office 360 migration discounts, etc...

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[Rob Y.]

Because 'The Cloud' has become as much a marketing buzzword as the real thing that it is, you will find companies embracing Azure to run their traditional Windows desktop apps 'in the cloud' using some combination of Azure and Citrix.

Those companies bought in to the Windows desktop paradigm and built database-centric client/server applications that in hindsight should have never been built that way - but that's what they have to sell, and if it will sell better if it's hosted 'in the cloud', then that's what they'll do. I've seen this approach taken first hand. It sucks, but if you can't do a rewrite, it's the best alternative to self-hosting a big database app and managing deployment to the desktop.

In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers. I don't know how the cost of Citrix figures in to this kind of deployment, though.

Re:The last mover disadavantage

[hairyfeet]

Sigh....because the board of directors at MSFT are a bunch of morons that are a half a decade behind the curve?

They let a CEO whose idea of innovation was "hey lets just copy Apple!" go only to....replace him with a CEO whose idea of innovation is "hey lets just copy Google!" with both not having a single fucking clue as to what made Apple and Google successful in their particular niches and even more importantly what made MSFT successful in its niche.

So instead of what we should be seeing, which is MSFT focusing on their core strengths and making Windows more desirable and useful in more application we now have our third Windows stinkbomb in a row, where not a week goes by where we aren't hearing of horrible crashes and BSODs like its fucking 1993 all over again and what is MSFT doing? Adding more spyware to their OS while trying to badly ape Google cloud which we all know will end up failing and costing the company billions....sigh.

Can we get Bill back PLEASE? Getting Steve back sure did wonders for Apple and Bill and Steve may have been assholes but they were assholes with a focus and direction, the Ballmernator and Nutella aren't even entertainingly bad, they are just sad like a cheap Chinese knockoff of an iPhone.

Too much catch up

[hsmith]

Been usin AWS for years and dug deep into azure. Their services are so far behind AWS in every measure it isn't feasible for them to catch up. On cute a new region.

France, Prolonged-State-Of-Emergency-France?

[burni2]

I mean, they have laws giving their secret service similar access to data centers .. and they also have "NSL" equivalent gag orders.

So, this was only the second worst decision.

Sounds like MS wants to 3 EU

[jsepeta]

After all the legal actions from the EU v Microsoft, by announcing a $3B investment in cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is aiming to reduce oversight and legal controversies.

Microsoft protects your email, UNLIKE GOOGLE!

[GerbilSoft]

Microsoft is the only company that will never read your email, unlike EVIL GOOGLE who reads everyone's emails to steal personal information!