Microsoft Office 365 now available from Indian datacentres

Two weeks after making Azure available locally in its three Indian datacentres , Microsoft has now announced locally hosted Office 365 services in India. On October 12, the software giant said Office 365 services will now be delivered in India from the local datacentres in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. [caption id=“attachment_2402286” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Source: Microsoft[/caption] “With the launch of our three new datacentres in India, Office 365 becomes the first global commercial cloud service to provide productivity and collaboration services from within India,” Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for the Office 365 team, said in a blogpost. “Businesses in India will benefit from all the innovation, security and compliance capabilities that customers around the world have come to expect from Office 365. With the new datacentres they will also get the added benefit of data residency, which is particularly important to organisations in regulated industries, such as banking, government and healthcare,” Jha noted. Greyhound Research CEO Sanchit Gogia said, “It would present lot of opportunities for Microsoft as well its customers and partners. Earlier, customers in banking and financial services and insurance (BFSI) and more specifically in the government had apprehensions using Office 365 because until now Microsoft had no local data centre in the country; and they had to go for hosted exchange.” “With the local data centres, Microsoft should be able to offer a locally hosted model where the data would reside in the country, which will address the data privacy for compliant and regulated industries such as BFSI and the government,” Gogia added.