Canada Joins Office 365 as a 1st Class Citizen

Microsoft today has announced that the company has launched datacenters for Office 365 in Canada.

Coming off recent announcements for Japan, Australia, and India, the new Canadian datacenter brings in-country data residency, failover, and disaster recovery.

Full press release:

TORONTO, May 10th 2016 – Microsoft Canada announced today that the Microsoft Cloud is now officially open to power even more Canadian businesses. With this announcement, Microsoft Azure is generally available from local datacentre regions located in Toronto and Quebec City, and Office 365 is now offering data residency for Canadian business customers. In addition, Dynamics CRM Online is scheduled to go live by September 2016 to bring the most complete cloud, with leadership across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and hybrid scenarios, to enable people and organizations to achieve more.

Microsoft's highly secure, enterprise grade, hyper-scale cloud is now delivered from Canadian soil. Azure and Office 365 customers gain the benefits of Microsoft’s trusted cloud services combined with data residency in Canada. This includes data redundancy in multiple locations within Canada for business continuity and the option of a fast and private connection to the cloud with Azure ExpressRoute.

“Our goal is to deliver Canada’s most trusted and complete cloud to power Canadian businesses and governments and ultimately enable them to achieve greater impact. By offering fully integrated cloud services, we create simple, cost-effective solutions that empower our customers.” said Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada. “And, the Microsoft Cloud in Canada and across the globe features the same industry-leading levels of security, privacy and control, compliance and transparency.”

Many Canadian customers and partners are already powered by the Microsoft Cloud. For PCL Construction, Canada’s largest contracting company, the cloud has enabled them to have a unified infrastructure in all the countries they operate. They have transformed their business and are now able to focus more on innovation and enhanced efficiency rather than the backend process. The result for PCL Construction is faster time to market, agility, and less operational overhead with over 80% cost savings since moving to Azure.

The Microsoft Cloud has also transformed the way Quebecor, a Canadian leader in telecommunications, entertainment, news media and culture, builds their IT environment’s. “Microsoft Azure gives us the high-performance infrastructure we need to handle major fluctuations in traffic and demand for a majority of our media websites and we get all of the compute capacity we need, when we need it, and only pay for what we use,” said Richard Roy, Vice President of IT and Chief Technology Officer, Quebecor.

For Stratiform, a Canadian cloud-based solution provider, the Microsoft cloud enables them to respond to their customers evolving business needs. "The announcement of Microsoft's new Canadian data centres provides a tremendous opportunity for us to grow our Canadian customer base," said Justin Kurtenback, Principal Consultant, Stratiform. "The cloud enables businesses to push innovation and drive business transformation, and the new Microsoft Cloud in Canada removes a vital barrier that has prevented us from working with major sectors of the Canadian market and broaden our offering for international companies.”

Microsoft is a global leader in compliance, with the broadest portfolio of certifications in the industry. John Hewie, National Security Officer, Microsoft Canada, says: “In Canada, many of our public sector customers and partners are finding that a standards-based approach to cloud compliance helps organizations more cost-effectively meet evolving compliance requirements.”

This focus on compliance together with local residency has resulted in many public sector customers moving to the Microsoft cloud in Canada including the Province of Nova Scotia, Province of New Brunswick, City of Regina and the City of Brampton. “Working with Microsoft is a tremendous opportunity for Nova Scotia. We encourage innovation and we are excited to be taking advantage of the newly opened Microsoft Canadian datacentre where we will begin moving more than 35,000 users to the Microsoft Canadian cloud over the coming years. Nova Scotia continues to be an innovative leader in Canada in many areas and this solution supports this visionary type of thinking,” Said Labi Kousoulis, Minister Internal Services, Province of Nova Scotia.

Today’s announcement in Canada brings the total number of generally available Azure regions to 24 globally, more than any other cloud provider, all backed by a $15 billion (USD) investment in global datacentre infrastructure.

Microsoft Expands ExpressRoute Partnerships

Microsoft also announced an expansion of its ExpressRoute offerings in Canada. “With so much momentum in the cloud, we are thrilled to welcome Bell Canada as the first Canadian telecommunications partner for Azure ExpressRoute,” said Janet Kennedy.

With the expansion, Canadian customers now have the option to create private connections to the Microsoft cloud. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds and lower latencies than typical internet connections.

ABOUT MICROSOFT CANADA

Established in 1985, Microsoft Canada Inc. is the Canadian subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq "MSFT") the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft Canada provides nationwide sales, marketing, consulting and local support services in both French and English. Headquartered in Mississauga, Microsoft Canada has nine regional offices across the country dedicated to empowering people through great software - any time, any place and on any device. For more information on Microsoft Canada, please visit www.microsoft.ca.