Microsoft Azure Cloud's Brazil South Region Goes Live

Microsoft Azure cloud's Brazil South region is now generally available. Public preview of the region was available several weeks ago, following roll-outs of new data center locations in China and Japan.

Microsoft is after all high-growth emerging markets. The company says its compute capacity is doubling every six months and more than 8,000 customers are signing up weekly.

Not only is Brazil a quickly growing market, it is moving forward with net neutrality laws that require data to be hosted within the country. This means service providers targeting the market need a local presence in order to succeed, which has attracted abundance of high-tech investment in the country. Microsoft already has a data center presence locally, having planned to add a data center in Brazil since at least 2009.

A recent IDC report says IT investments in Brazil have reached $61.6 billion.  The country ranks seventh in terms of global IT investment, following the U.S., Japan, China, UK, Germany and France. Researchers expect Brazil to replace France next year in sixth place. A Frost & Sullivan report pegged Brazil’s cloud computing market at $328.8 million in 2013.

A number of customers are already using the new region, including credit rating company Boa Vista Servicos, business management software provider Totvs, computing systems provider SiplanControl-M and e-commerce website platform Shop Delivery

“In Brazil, and our other regions around the world, we’ve seen incredible demand for a global enterprise public cloud offering,” Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “Globally, more than 1,000 new customers join Azure every day, and revenue grew more than 150 percent in the last quarter. With Microsoft Azure now generally available in the new Brazil South region, even more customers can take advantage of the cloud.”

Azure ain't the only one

Amazon Web Services first expanded its cloud to South America in 2011 with data center infrastructure in Sao Paolo. It added a second edge location for its cloud in in Rio de Janeiro early this year. Cisco is making a major investment in the country, and recently began producing its UCS servers there.

Equinix  first entered the market with an investment in ALOG, providing it with three Brazil-based IBX data centers to offer managed hosting and colocation services for customers looking to expand in the region.

Other providers that have expanded into the country include Dimension Data,  Verizon Terremark and cloud and managed services provider Latisys. A popular entry point is via strategic partnership. Latisys partnered with Ascenty, a rapidly emerging metro fiber and data center services provider in Brazil.