Microsoft launch UK Cloud data centers - clouds coming to your Neighborhood

The recent announcement of local UK data centers by Microsoft in London, Durham and Cardiff is part of a bigger picture of the large cloud computing providers “setting up shop” on local territory to provide better access and performance of their cloud products and services.

Its been 12 months since the ruling of Safehabor not long enabling EU citizen data to to automatically moved and stored in the US, citing out of date data protection laws and new EU led laws to protect EU citizen privacy and data rights. The follow up negotiations of the EU-US Privacy shield work around as recent at April 2016 has raise more concerns over EU citizen’s data and massive and indiscriminate’ surveillance by US government.

Large US cloud companies like Microsoft, Amazon, google and others have much to gain and potential lose in navigating these legal issues yet the adoption and scale of cloud computing as a mainstream as an unstoppable force in business transformation is here to stay. With no significant EU alternatives, UK companies continue to move to the cloud as reinforced by the MOD need to modernize IT through adoption of “on-demand” cloud services.

By being “on-shore” some work around can begin in placing EU citizen data within the country jurisdiction. Modern Cloud Data Centers have the ability to partition and rapidly accelerate access to software-as-a-service products and computing capacity for storage and data analytics. The economics of these centers are highly compelling for companies in pubic and private sectors, and with the addition of secure zones and security they can offer private cloud services for tenants while gaining access to new modern software and rapid elastic capacity to meet flexible business demands that goes on the Opex spend line rather than locked in Capex investment.

The fact that organizations like Defense companies of the MOD will consider external cloud data centers has been something of a turning point for companies that have originally been in the consumer public cloud market and perceived as inherently insecure will all kinds of public tenants. Modern Cloud computing security partitioning and software-defined networks and infrastructure are enabling new robust levels of encryption and secure access enabling part of whole migration of some business and content to be managed as a secure cloud services. The problems of cyber have not gone away but it is a sign of the maturing cloud computing industry and isn’t ability to in cases speed up from weeks to seconds and 70-80% reduction in some IT operating cost savings. With the “Internet of Things” now connecting potentially everything, the sea of data will get even larger and companies need to be able to access and scale with innovation and new advances in machine intelligence, automation and augmented reality services. Having cloud computing is a vital infrastructure layer of the modern digital economy and that, with broadband and network investment will drive new levels of market penetration and enterprise performance.

On the UK security, for industries such as public services and academia, it’s a question on how current Education and Research Cloud computing clusters work, this is another option for the current infrastructure to exploit local Cloud computing resources that have Enterprise Class level security and professional operations provided by Microsoft. Strategically we have seen Google working towards pricing to match Amazon cloud in this highly competitive market so another entrant of Microsoft should be good for pricing competition. The other issues of data access and privacy we have seen the likes of the NHS using Google Deepmind computing to conduction translation research on image scanning using Google’s cloud resources. Its nolonger an question of if but when, but it then leads to new questions on privacy and national infrastructure dependencies on critical infrastructure services that may be externally owned.

#CloudComputing #Microsoft