Since the launch of Microsoft ’s datacenter regions in Germany in August 2019, we have seen incredible momentum with many customers using Microsoft enterprise-grade cloud services for productivity, collaboration, and digital transformation across industries.

Microsoft’s local cloud regions help enable organizations to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, including the requirement to store customer data within Germany.

Microsoft is continuing to grow its cloud offerings in Germany with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI  now available in the German cloud regions. In January 2021, Azure Availability Zones will become generally available in the Germany West Central region. The Availability Zones will expand customer options to develop highly available and resilient applications and provide the ability to withstand data center failures. Additionally, for Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo customers, the German cloud regions will be added to a growing list of supported geos beginning October 1, 2020.

Today, the Microsoft data center regions in Germany provide the latest innovation across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure, with local data residency, security and compliance. To best meet current and future customer needs, we will migrate customers from Microsoft Cloud Deutschland (MCD), an isolated cloud environment, to the German data center regions with the benefit of local data residency, and retire MCD on October 29, 2021.

New migration options for the new German cloud regions

Long-standing Microsoft partners, including Deutsche Telekom AG, support the migration of customers from Microsoft Cloud Germany to the Germany cloud regions. Customers using Azure in MCD can now migrate to the new German cloud regions. Customers using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and/or Power BI will be informed through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center when these migrations can be started. Initial migrations will begin shortly, with broadly available migrations starting in January 2021.

Announcing Azure Availability Zones in Germany

Availability Zones provide customers additional protection from potential hardware, software, and physical failures for their mission-critical applications, offering access to fault-isolated locations within an Azure region and independent networking, power and cooling. For customers using two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region, Microsoft guarantees Virtual Machine connectivity to at least one instance 99.99% of the time. Azure Availability Zones will be generally available in January 2021 in the German West Central region.

Addressing customer needs for data security and compliance in Germany

With Microsoft German cloud regions, companies benefit from full connectivity to Microsoft’s global cloud network with the latest innovative services, while meeting regulatory, security and compliance requirements.

Microsoft holds more than 90 national and international data protection, security and compliance offerings including ISO 27001, ISO 27018, ISO 27701, SOC and the BSI C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog).