That storage will not come from a single location. Instead Microsoft will hold the data in three separate physical places from its Singapore Azure Region. In a blogpost today, Microsoft’s Patrik Bihammar explained how separating the data helps efficiency: “To ensure resiliency, there is a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions. The physical separation of Availability Zones within a region protects applications and data from datacentre failures. With Availability Zones, Azure offers industry-leading 99.99 percent Virtual Machine uptime SLA.” Bihammar adds that Microsoft builds at least three separate data zones in each Azure region. This is necessary to enhance security and protect from datacenter failures. “By building application architecture using a combination of Availability Zones with Azure region pairs, customers can synchronously replicate applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability within Singapore, and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for geographic disaster recovery protection,” he explained. To introduce cloud storage centers in Singapore, Microsoft has to meet several requirements of operation. Among them was Level 3 of the Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) Standard for Singapore, a security standard that operates several tiers of protections.
New Zones
Back in October, Microsoft expanded Azure’s reach by debuting two new Azure Availability Zone locations. The company expanded Azure Availability Zones into the West U.S. 2 and North Europe Azure regions.
