Microsoft Data Centers Blog

Microsoft’s General Manager of Data Center Services Christian Belady will present on Wednesday, May 15 at the Uptime Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., discussing the company’s cloud infrastructure strategy and how the latest technology trends are influencing to changes in our data centers. Read More >>

Last November we announced our zero carbon Data Plant R&D project in Cheyenne, Wyoming. For a quick refresher, we’re placing a small container data center we call an IT Pre-Assembled Component, or ITPAC, at a wastewater treatment facility in Cheyenne. A natural bi-product of a wastewater plant is methane gas, which is typically flared off because it’s uneconomical to recover and convert to grid energy. At our Data Plant, we view this methane gas as an opportunity to provide a reliable power source to power a data center, and we decided to launch this project to test the concept and the capabilities. Read More >>

Microsoft is committed to giving customers the information they need to have confidence in us as a cloud provider. Today, we continue to share our best practices and key learnings to be as open and transparent as possible, and contribute to industry and community efforts to increase trust in the cloud. While there is complexity in the cloud and in some of the security techniques necessary to protect cloud services, explanations should be clear. Read More >>

Attacks on Country-Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) have far-reaching effects on private individuals, large and small companies, non-profits, and government organizations. Today, I wrote on the Microsoft Security blog about a new Microsoft Country-Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) Registry Security Assessment Service that we are now offering to address this challenge. Read More >>

Operating and maintaining the infrastructure behind Microsoft’s huge cloud is a mission critical endeavor. With over 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, and the Windows Azure platform running in our data centers, the Global Foundation Services’ (GFS) team is a key component in delivering the highly available experience our customers expect from the cloud. To do this effectively, we’re continuously evolving our operational strategies to drive quality and efficiency up while lowering costs and increasing overall value to our customers. Read More >>