Microsoft has revealed it is expanding the capacity of its cloud services and Microsoft Azure to keep up with demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In a blog post, the company says it is constantly working to ensure there is enough service performance for all users, but is prioritizing frontline workers, first responders, and healthcare organizations.
To help handle the load, Microsoft is boosting its worldwide data center output and says it is adding more resource limits to new Azure customers.
On the Microsoft Azure blog, Microsoft says how it is managing “business continuity with Azure”, including helping customers complete urgent work and continuing to expand Azure alongside ongoing demands.
At the end of last month, Microsoft said it was tweaking cloud services like Microsoft Teams to handle growing demand. In an Azure blog post, Microsoft said “We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.”
Microsoft Teams Demand
Last week, Microsoft corrected that 775% information because the data only related to Teams in Italy. And it seems Microsoft Teams is the focus of the company’s continued push to manage Azure to keep up with demand.
In the latest blog post, Microsoft explains how Teams continues to grow:
“Last month, the surging use of Teams for remote work and education due to the pandemic crossed into unprecedented territory. Although we had seen surges in specific data center regions or wider geographies before, such as in response to natural disasters, the substantial Teams demand increase from Asia and then quickly followed in Europe indicated that we were seeing something very different, and increasingly global.”
To refocus Teams and prepare it for the massive surge in users, Microsoft took these steps:
- “Optimized and load-balanced Teams architecture without interrupting the customer experience.
- Expediting additional server capacity to the specific regions that faced constraints.
- Approving the backlog of customer quota requests.
- Removing restrictions for new free and benefit subscriptions in several regions.
- Refining our Azure demand models.”
Last Updated on September 14, 2020 4:19 pm CEST by Luke Jones
