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Customers such as Air Canada and Lululemon have already been using these services out of U.S. datacentres, noted Doug Hauger, general manager, national cloud programs at Microsoft, but, he said “Today, we’re giving customers the opportunity to address their data residency concerns.”

However, he added, “data residency is only one concern. Customers won’t use technology they don’t trust.” To that end, he said, Microsoft has achieved 37 compliance certifications and attestations used worldwide, and should there be additional requirements within a specific geography, it will implement them there.

“We’re PCI compliant,” he said, “so when a customer or partner needs to be PCI compliant, they just go to the website, print out the paperwork, and sign it.” That process may be more onerous on other clouds, which merely provide instructions on how to become PCI compliant.

The combination of rigorous security and data residency has lured a number of public sector institutions, including Province of Nova Scotia, Province of New Brunswick, City of Regina and the City of Brampton to Azure. “We’re so excited to have the public sector on board,” Kennedy said. “They wouldn’t move until we had datacentres in country.”

“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,” said Labi Kousoulis, Minister Internal Services, Province of Nova Scotia, in a statement. “Nova Scotia continues to be an innovative leader in Canada in many areas and this solution supports this visionary type of thinking.”

Canadian SMBs are behind other developed countries, Kennedy noted. Many are still running very old ERP software – even some from the Y2K era. Dynamics AX on Azure will save them money, and then the question will turn to how they can innovate. “This is a chance for Canadians to catch up in productivity,” Kennedy said.