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Microsoft has announced it has opened the first data centres in England and Wales- allowing customers’ information to remain in the UK.
The centres, based in London, Cardiff and Durham, mean that Microsoft Azure and Office 365 is now available to Automated Intelligence customers in industries such as government, banking and healthcare who wish to have their data managed in the UK.
The opening of the provider’s first UK cloud computing data centres has been much anticipated since plans were unveiled by Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella at the end of last year.
CEO of Automated Intelligence, Mark Godfrey said, “We work with many customers whose information is sensitive and not suitable to be managed outside the UK. The opening of these new data centres today is fantastic news and undoubtedly meets their requirements of local data residency and data sovereignty.
“Restrictions on where their data can be held means they have been on-premise fileshares and legacy systems, which have been costly and inefficient to run. Our customers can now transition to the Microsoft UK cloud platform, which we know is becoming an inevitable part of digital transformation.”
CTO of Automated Intelligence, Simon Cole said, “We are delighted to see the new data centres being made publically available. We have been working with Microsoft over the past months testing our solutions in the run up to the platform going live. This will bring a new level of service and capability to a wide range of organisations in the UK.”
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is one of the first organisations to run Azure services in the Microsoft data centres. With the addition of the three new Microsoft centres today, 28 are now available around the world, with six more coming soon.
Automated Intelligence has been a Microsoft Gold Partner since 2013.
