In recent years, cloud adoption has grown exponentially, thus driving the expansion of cloud computing centers. In line with this trend, Microsoft Azure has strengthened and expanded its infrastructure, while a growing number of companies and organizations rely on its services to support critical operations. As a result, Azure regions have experienced significant expansion across Europe, establishing themselves as the best option for organizations looking for performance, scalability and security in their cloud solutions.
Microsoft Azure has a strong network of regions in Europe, strategically located to optimize performance and ensure the availability of its services across the continent. Each Azure region in Europe is designed not only to support a wide range of infrastructure services, but also to comply with strict privacy and security regulations, including GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance. This configuration allows organizations in Europe to choose the region that best suits their compliance and data management needs, an aspect that differentiates Azure from other cloud platforms. Additionally, Azure regions are interconnected using Microsoft’s global fiber network, enabling high availability, low latency, and disaster recovery across regions. With continued investments in renewable energy and sustainable data centers, Azure is also committed to reducing its carbon footprint, aligning with European initiatives towards digital sustainability and climate neutrality.
However, the growing adoption of the cloud by companies in all sectors is leading to saturation of these data centers and for this reason, it is essential to consider the design of architectures that facilitate the efficient distribution of workloads to throughout the entire European territory.
In this sense, at myCloudDoor, we play a key role in accompanying companies on their “Cloud Journey”, providing our knowledge in advanced architectures and optimization of cloud services. This specialized support translates into tailored solutions for each client, facilitating the adoption of multi-region strategies and the deployment of resilient architectures that maximize performance and ensure business continuity.
Saturation of Azure North Europe and West Europe regions
In this broad ecosystem of regions, the regions of North Europe (located in Dublin, Ireland) y West Europe (located in Amsterdam, Netherlands) have long been the two main Azure zones for enterprises in Europe. These two regions not only stand out for their size, but also for the wide range of services they offer, becoming key points for numerous companies that have chosen to migrate their operations to the cloud.
However, in recent years, North Europe y West Europe have experienced a significant increase in demand, leading to temporary saturation in these regions. On some occasions, this has caused longer provisioning times than initially anticipated. This phenomenon highlights the importance of designing distributed architectures across multiple regions that can ensure business availability and continuity. Here, our experience and guidance enables organizations to mitigate risks and make the most of such global infrastructure.
Multi-region architectures: an approach to resilience and optimization
The mitigation of these problems lies in the adoption of architectures multiregion. Distributing workloads between different Azure regions, a process that myCloudDoor helps implement, allows organizations to improve high availability, resilience y performance of its applications and services. By using multiple regions, companies can avoid dependence on a single zone, which not only mitigates the risk of overload in saturated regions, but also allows them to take advantage of certain features such as Geographic Redundancy and Latency Optimization.
Azure, allows geographic redundancy in part of its services, which allows the implementation of multi-region architectures that provide greater resilience. This approach ensures that if one region experiences an outage or excessive load, applications remain operational in other regions, ensuring business continuity. Companies can thus minimize risks and ensure the constant availability of their critical services, regardless of regional challenges.
Additionally, a multi-region architecture optimize latency by distributing workloads as close as possible to end users. This approach helps to significantly reduce response times, improving the user experience, especially in applications that require high interactivity. The proximity of data and applications to the end user is essential in sectors where their systems have a direct impact on their supply or production centers. In the financial sector, for example, it allows transactions and queries to be processed in nearby data centers, offering real-time experiences and supporting high volumes without impact on performance.
Finally, the distribution of the data across multiple regions also supports the regulatory and legal complianceespecially in environments with strict regulations. Although Microsoft is actively working to comply with European regulations, many companies, especially those in highly regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare, have specific requirements regarding the localization of data storage and processing. By leveraging multiple Azure regions, these organizations can ensure their data stays within required boundaries, facilitating regulatory compliance and strengthening their data privacy and security posture.
How to Build a Scalable and Resilient Multi-Region Infrastructure in Azure.
Implementing a multi-region architecture in Azure may seem challenging, we facilitate this process through our technical expertise and deep knowledge of Azure tools. Its benefits in terms of high availability, resilience and overall performance are indisputable. By distributing your applications and data across multiple Azure regions, you can ensure your infrastructure is more resilient, with minimal downtime and globally consistent performance.
To start, it’s crucial to understand the goals of your solution. If your priority is to guarantee the global availability and the disaster recoveryAzure offers tools such as Availability Zones y Azure Load Balancerwhich ensure that applications remain operational even if a region fails. Furthermore, with Azure Site Recovery and the data geo-replicationyou can protect your data and applications from regional disasters.
We also guide companies in the selection of strategic regionsanother key aspect. By choosing data centers close to your primary users, you can reduce the latency and improve the user experience. It is also important to consider the geographic redundancy to ensure continuity of service in the event of regional failures. If you have users in multiple geographies, combining regions can give you robust global coverage.
Efficient connectivity between regions is essential to ensure fast performance. Tools like Azure Virtual WAN, Traffic Manager y Azure Front Door They allow us to optimize traffic between different regions and ensure that users always reach the closest server. In turn, we support the automation of deployment processes and data synchronization with Azure Cosmos DB y SQL Database con Geo-Replication to achieve reliable global replication.
Another important point is the automation. Use tools like ARM Templates, Azure DevOps o Terraform allows you to manage and deploy your infrastructure consistently across all regions, ensuring that every resource is correctly configured.
Constant monitoring of infrastructure is essential. Here, we help implement and manage tools like Azure Monitor y Log Analyticsto gain visibility into the status of your resources in different regions. Additionally, services such as Azure Security Center y Azure Policy They help us apply security and compliance policies consistently globally.
Finally, the cost management In a multi-region architecture it is crucial to avoid surprises. Tools like Azure Cost Management allow you to optimize the use of resources and take advantage of discounts such as Reserved Instances for constant workloads.
The importance of the region Central Spain in this context.
In response to the increasing saturation of its most in-demand regions and its constant growth, Microsoft has inaugurated the Central Spain region in Azure, a new strategic option for companies in southern Europe. This region offers all the capabilities of the Azure platformcovering a wide range of essential services, such as Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Power Platform e Artificial intelligence. Additionally, it provides early access to new services which will be released soon in previewallowing organizations to be at the forefront of the latest cloud innovations.
Located in the center of the Iberian Peninsula, this region offers several strategic advantages:
- Geographic proximity: For companies operating in Spain or in the southern region of Europe, choose Central Spain It allows you to reduce latency with respect to other regions, which is crucial for applications that require fast and constant responses.
- Low latency and high availability: Thanks to its geographical proximity, Central Spain can offer latencies for the Spanish territory below double digits.
- Compliance with European legislation: For companies that need to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the fact that Central Spain is within the European Union ensures that data is handled in accordance with European data protection regulations.
- Expansion of capabilities: Microsoft has invested heavily in the expansion and updating of the infrastructure of this region, which has positioned it as a “Hero” region, making it a future option for organizations seeking scalability, resilience and functionality.
In conclusion, Microsoft Azure’s multi-region approach offers a robust solution for businesses looking to optimize their resilience, compliance, and performance in a constantly evolving environment. By distributing their applications and data across multiple regions, organizations not only reduce downtime and ensure continuity of operations, but also improve user experience and adapt to local regulatory requirements. With a global network and a continued commitment to sustainability and innovation, the combination of Azure and myCloudDoor allows companies to build secure, scalable and sustainable infrastructures, ensuring their cloud future is prepared for any challenge.
Signed: Daniel Guerrero, Cloud Platform TS Director en myCloudDoor
