Microsoft has more than doubled the size of its Azure regions in the UK with the addition of Availability Zones, increasing compute capacity by more than 1,500% since they were first brought online in 2016.

Building on Microsoft’s strong presence in the UK, the expansion will further help UK organisations embrace digital transformation aiding in their journeys to the cloud.

The move is likely to appeal to public sector organisations interested in hosting potentially sensitive information securely and locally.

Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, is used by the Department for Education, HM Revenue and Customs, and NHS Blood and Transplant, as well as numerous councils across the country.

They can use two Azure regions in the UK – South and West – which host data for organisations and businesses based anywhere in the world.

Within the first month of Microsoft’s cloud services going online from the UK, the company shared that more than 1,000 customers had already signed up to access services.

Today, tens of thousands of organisations across the country are utilising the Microsoft cloud services delivered from the UK.

Microsoft has continued to invest in its cloud infrastructure and service capabilities to meet the demand of this expanding customer base.

As part of this investment, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Availability Zones in UK South.

Availability Zones offer customers access to separate, physical locations within an Azure region featuring independent networking, power and cooling, as well as more protection and choice when using Microsoft’s cloud.

Cindy Rose, chief executive of Microsoft UK said, “The Microsoft cloud has become a core component to the strategies of thousands of UK organisations since the launch of services from our UK cloud regions in 2016.”

“We continue to make significant investments to ensure that our customers are able accelerate their digital transformation journeys and their adoption of cloud services.”

“By doubling our UK regions and increasing our compute capacity by more than 1,500%, our customers can have the confidence they can access any Azure services available in UK regions whenever they want.”

“The launch of Availability Zones takes Azure to a new level in the UK by offering customers increased reliability, business continuity and peace of mind for their data and services.”

Microsoft has also announced the availability of Azure DevOps in the UK South region. The service lets users create software, using tools that Microsoft has invested in and developed over the past 15 years.

In the previous month alone, more than 100,000 internal Microsoft users and millions of customers have used these services to build their own products and release them to the cloud and to their on-premise data centres.

Azure DevOps contains tools that span the complete development of software, helping customers ship quicker and with higher quality.

Features include Azure Pipelines, which allow you to continuously build, test and deploy to any platform and cloud; Azure Boards, which allow teams to easily plan, track and collaborate; Azure Repos to store and collaborate on source code, Azure Artifacts for sharing packages inside your company and Azure Test Plans, which lets users improve their code with testing services.