S�o Paulo–Mi­crosoft an­nounced that it is in­vest­ing in the de­vel­op­ment of a new Win­dows Azure re­gion in Brazil, which rep­re­sents an im­por­tant step for­ward in the com­pa­ny's cloud ex­pan­sion strat­e­gy and its com­mit­ment to the coun­try, Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

World­wide, Mi­crosoft has in­vest­ed more than US $1 bil­lion in Azure, which is cur­rent­ly avail­able in 89 coun­tries. As of the first half of 2014, com­pa­nies through­out Brazil, Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean will be able to reap the ben­e­fits of­fered by Azure, in­clud­ing lo­cal da­ta and ap­pli­ca­tion stor­age, as well as greater agili­ty and ef­fi­cien­cy for cus­tomers and part­ners.

"This in­vest­ment re­in­forces Mi­crosoft's com­mit­ment to Brazil dur­ing this pe­ri­od of trans­for­ma­tion as a de­vices and ser­vices com­pa­ny. Our cor­po­rate strat­e­gy is dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed, as we are the on­ly com­pa­ny of­fer­ing all pub­lic and pri­vate cloud mod­els, en­abling cus­tomers to re­duce costs and in­no­vate at a faster pace," said Mar­i­ano de Beer, pres­i­dent of Mi­crosoft Brazil, who not­ed that the Win­dows Azure busi­ness unit in Brazil is grow­ing quick­ly, at al­most twice the mar­ket rate.

"Brazil is one of Mi­crosoft's ten most im­por­tant glob­al mar­kets, and we are com­mit­ted to mak­ing tech­nol­o­gy a fun­da­men­tal dri­ving force for busi­ness growth in the coun­try," he added.

Ac­cord­ing to Steven Mar­tin, gen­er­al man­ag­er of Win­dows Azure at Mi­crosoft Cor­po­ra­tion, the Win­dows Azure Brazil South Re­gion will pro­vide bet­ter per­for­mance for lo­cal com­pa­nies through re­duced la­ten­cy. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, cus­tomers will be able to opt for Lo­cal­ly Re­dun­dant Stor­age (LRS), which will main­tain three copies of their da­ta in Brazil, pre­serv­ing da­ta res­i­den­cy. "It's an ex­cit­ing time to ex­pand in­to Brazil, and to­day's an­nounce­ment rep­re­sents our con­tin­ued com­mit­ment to meet our lo­cal cus­tomers' ex­pec­ta­tions."

Win­dows Azure, which has been in the mar­ket in Brazil since 2010 for busi­ness­es of all sizes, start-ups, and de­vel­op­ers, of­fers cloud com­put­ing pow­er with so­lu­tions that pro­vide scal­a­bil­i­ty and se­cu­ri­ty. "The port­fo­lio of Win­dows Azure ser­vices con­tin­ues to ex­pand and im­prove to bet­ter sup­port the grow­ing de­mand for cloud so­lu­tions in the mar­ket," said An­dr� Echev­er­ria, di­rec­tor of the Servers Di­vi­sion at Mi­crosoft Brazil.

The cred­it in­for­ma­tion firm, Boa Vista Servi�os is one of the many com­pa­nies that has ben­e­fit­ed from us­ing Win­dows Azure in Brazil. In search of a plat­form that guar­an­teed greater flex­i­bil­i­ty to sup­port peak ac­cess times, Boa Vista se­lect­ed Win­dows Azure in June 2013.

The com­pa­ny has two Mi­crosoft plat­form ap­pli­ca­tions: the Pos­i­tive Con­sumer site, which al­lows users to con­sult on­line in­for­ma­tion re­lat­ed to their cred­it, as well as a Win­dows 8 app ver­sion of the site. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the e-com­merce an­ti-fraud ser­vice of­fered by Boa Vista is al­so host­ed on Azure.

"Mi­crosoft helped us mi­grate our in­fra­struc­ture to the cloud based on our needs. We can en­joy the ben­e­fits of cloud com­put­ing ser­vices through a hy­brid mod­el which en­sures with com­plete con­fi­dence the se­cu­ri­ty for our in­for­ma­tion, plus the agili­ty and scal­a­bil­i­ty that on­ly the cloud can fa­cil­i­tate," said Waldir di San­tis, IT Di­rec­tor at Boa Vista Servi�os.

Com­pa­nies of all sizes are us­ing and ben­e­fit­ing from Win­dows Azure in Latin Amer­i­ca, in­clud­ing, in Cos­ta Ri­ca and Colom­bia. Win­dows Azure is ex­treme­ly re­li­able and flex­i­ble. The vast ex­pe­ri­ence gained by im­ple­ment­ing some of the world's most im­por­tant on­line ser­vices has en­abled the com­pa­ny to de­vel­op a re­li­able plat­form for the cor­po­rate mar­ket.

This prod­uct is the on­ly pub­lic cloud to of­fer and pro­vide full sup­port for all In­fra­struc­ture Ser­vices and Plat­form Ser­vices, not to men­tion that it is com­pat­i­ble with hy­brid en­vi­ron­ments. With In­fra­struc­ture Ser­vices, or­ga­ni­za­tions can now eas­i­ly mi­grate to the pub­lic cloud and al­so con­trol their costs to re­main com­pet­i­tive with the pre-pay­ment and pur­chase op­tions.

Win­dows Azure is al­so com­pat­i­ble with vir­tu­al de­vices (Win­dows and Lin­ux, SQL Serv­er and Hadoop) and on open-source struc­tures such as Word­press, Joom­la and Dru­pal. De­vel­op­ers who work with.NET, Ja­va, PHP, Node.js and Python can use the SDK avail­able free of charge