Microsoft Azure Germany adds features, gains security compliance certifications

Microsoft Azure Germany launched last year in September and since then it has been developing its services to better cater to the needs of European businesses. Today, their team announced four major functionality releases along with some crowning achievements that make Microsoft Azure Germany stand on its own two feet.

The latest services for Azure in Germany include:

• HDInsight on Linux – Business customers can extract important information from their data sources with open sourced Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R Server technologies.
•  Power BI – Similar to other Power BI services provided through Microsoft Azure, German and EU customers can turn their data processing into analytics and build customized reports.
• Cool Blob Storage – Announced almost a year ago, Azure Germany now has access to storing large volumes of data for longer terms. These are perfect for backups, media content, or archives considering their retrieval processing yet at a lower cost than what customers are paying now.
• Mobile Apps for Azure App Service – EU customers are now able to take advantage of making mobile application development cross platform with the Azure App Service.

On a high note for Microsoft Azure Germany, their services now meet the ISO/IEC 27001 certification and ISO/IEC 27018 compliance attestation. What this means is the commitment to security that Microsoft often displays has been approved by global security standards by EU data-protection laws.

These new services and achievements ride on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement to keep German Office 365 customer data within their own borders. Perhaps we’ll see similarly for Azure in the months to come.