Azure infrastructure availability

This article provides information about how Microsoft secures the Azure infrastructure and provides maximum availability for customer data. Azure provides high availability, based on extensive redundancy achieved with virtualization technology.

Temporary outages and natural disasters

The Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations team designs, builds, operates, and improves the security of the cloud infrastructure. This team ensures that the Azure infrastructure delivers high availability and reliability, high efficiency, and smart scalability. The team provides a more secure, private, and trusted cloud.

Uninterruptible power supplies and vast banks of batteries ensure that electricity remains continuous if a short-term power disruption occurs. Emergency generators provide backup power for extended outages and planned maintenance. If a natural disaster occurs, the datacenter can use onsite fuel reserves.

High-speed and resilient fiber optic networks connect datacenters with other major hubs and internet users. Compute nodes host workloads closer to users to reduce latency, provide geo-redundancy, and increase overall service resiliency. A team of engineers works around the clock to ensure services are continuously available.

Microsoft ensures high availability through advanced monitoring and incident response, service support, and backup failover capability. Geographically distributed Microsoft operations centers operate 24/7/365. The Azure network is one of the largest in the world. The fiber optic and content distribution network connects datacenters and edge nodes to ensure high performance and reliability.

Disaster recovery

Azure keeps your data durable in two locations. You can choose the location of the backup site. In the primary location, Azure constantly maintains three healthy replicas of your data.

Database availability

Azure ensures that a database is internet accessible through an internet gateway with sustained database availability. Monitoring assesses the health and state of the active databases at five-minute time intervals.

Storage availability

Azure delivers storage through a highly scalable and durable storage service, which provides connectivity endpoints. Applications can access the storage service directly. The storage service processes incoming storage requests efficiently, with transactional integrity.

Next steps

To learn more about what Microsoft does to help secure the Azure infrastructure, see:

• Azure facilities, premises, and physical security
• Azure information system components and boundaries
• Azure network architecture
• Azure production network
• Azure SQL Database security features
• Azure production operations and management
• Azure infrastructure monitoring
• Azure infrastructure integrity
• Azure customer data protection