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Microsoft has announced a series of partnerships to invest in subsea cables and terrestrial dark fibre capacity in order to better connect their global data centres.
The partnerships are with Ireland-based subsea capacity-based network provider AquaComms and telecoms service providers Hibernia Networks and Chunghwa Telecom. David Crowley, managing director for network enablement at Azure, notes: “As people and organisations expect data and information at their fingertips, Microsoft must have an infrastructure that can deliver the cloud services, including Azure, which our customers need to support their global businesses.”
Hibernia announced it had been selected by Microsoft to provide connectivity between Canada, Ireland and the UK; AquaComms revealed Microsoft was its first customer on the America Europe Connect subsea cable system; and Chunghwa announced the beginning of construction of the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network, with Redmond among the NCP consortium.
In a blog post, Crowley explained: “When we look to the future with these investments, we believe our customers will see that Microsoft is pulling together all the components necessary to make its cloud services the most reliable, accessible and secure.
“Competition in the cloud and infrastructure space continues to heat up. But it’s not a battle that will be won on just cloud or infrastructure alone, but instead on holistic innovation and providing value to customers from the ‘sea to the sky,’” he added.
As cloud adoption grows, network traffic will bear the brunt of it, and so the new cables will enable Microsoft to deliver data at higher speeds, with higher capacity and lower latency for global customers. Naturally, Microsoft’s own initiatives will anticipate a spike. The proposed ceasing of support for Windows Server 2003, on July 14, will be part of this, as recent figures from the Cloud Industry Forum revealed more than 80% adoption of cloud services in the UK, and 58% of companies polled still running WS2003.