Microsoft has announced it will be able to offer French customers secure, local access to Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 from datacentres situated around the country.
Although the services won't launch until 2017, Microsoft said it would make a big difference to companies based in the country that no longer want their service running out of datacentres in Germany, the UK or Ireland.
“We continue to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from European customers and partners,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO.
“Building a global, trusted, intelligent cloud platform is core to our mission to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. There’s never been a better time for organizations across Europe to seize new growth and opportunity with the Microsoft Cloud.”
Nadella also revealed that Microsoft has spent $3 billion on European cloud infrastructure to date and has more than doubled its cloud capacity in the continent.
"These new investments in cloud are helping customers — including the UK Ministry of Defence, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, Ireland’s Health Service Executive and ZF from Germany — to innovate in their industries and move their businesses to the cloud while meeting European data sovereignty, security and compliance needs," Microsoft said.
Last week, Amazon announced it would be offering availability of its AWS cloud services in Paris, showing demand for public cloud in France is growing rapidly and local businesses are demanding the flexibility of having data stored in their own country.
Google has also announced rapid expansion, opening up new datacentres in Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Finland, and Frankfurt to address client wishes to have their data stored in local data centres, rather than those in the general region.
