Azure Customers Can Post Their Hard Drives To Microsoft For Cloud Uploads

Microsoft Azure customers who want to move large amounts of information to the cloud are now able to have their hard drives transported to data centres in the UK.

Azure Import/Export uses Microsoft’s internal network to connect a customer’s hard drive to the cloud, rather than the more expensive and less secure option of moving data via an Internet connection.

Customers simply post their hard drive to Microsoft via a courier for the company to upload the information to the cloud before sending the hard drive back to the customer, all for a flat fee.

Azure updates

Azure Import/Export is one of three new features Microsoft has recently made available in UK data centres for local customers.

Businesses can also now analyse large amounts of data with HDInsight, the only fully-managed Hadoop service in the cloud which provides reliable, scalable and distributed computing on industry-standard servers.

And finally, Microsoft has announced the release of Azure Container Registry in the UK, enabling customers to store and manage private Docker container images.

“Companies of all sizes are embracing containers as a fast and portable way to lift, shift and modernise into cloud-native apps,” said Steve Lasker, program manager for Azure Developer Experiences. “As part of this process, customers need a way to store and manage images for all types of container deployments.

“Azure Container Registry integrates well with orchestrators hosted in Azure Container Service, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and DC/OS as well as other Azure Services including Service Fabric and Azure App Services. Customers can benefit from using familiar tooling capable of working with the open source Docker Registry v2.”

Microsoft has announced multiple Azure updates in recent months as it attempts to keep pace with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google, which has so far proved successful in Europe.

For example, in the UK this year Microsoft has added advanced search capabilities, introduced Azure Backup and Site Recovery services and released a blueprint to support UK Government security practices.

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