The IACP Conference in San Diego (Calif.) gave cloud giants Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure another market to conquer: the public sector.
The event was sponsored by both AWS and Microsoft. It was hosted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Both companies used the opportunity to challenge each other in areas such as cloud coverage and public sector credibility.
AWS announced Monday that it has opened a new region in Columbus. This is its fifth American region and third this year, after Seoul and Mumbai. AWS’ cloud infrastructure roster now includes 38 availability zones and 14 new regions. The Ohio region now has three availability zones. It plans to open four additional regions in France, Canada, Canada, and China. This blog post contains a comprehensive list of services that AWS has supported in Ohio by Jeff Barr, an AWS evangelist.
AWS praised Ohio as a boon to the region’s education and public sector customers. Customers and residents of the area will both benefit from new technology opportunities within state and local government agencies, as well as in the growing startup- and developer community in Ohio. AWS said it was looking forward to working with local businesses and public sector organisations to build a cloud ecosystem. AWS will also collaborate with local students and teachers to help develop the next generation of cloud computing professionals.
Microsoft, for its part, detailed plans to offer four additional cloud areas specifically for government agencies. According to Jason Zander (corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure), two new regions for DoD — one in the middle of the U.S. and one on the East Coast — will open by the end of 2016. In 2017, two more Azure Government regions will open — one in Arizona, and one in Texas.
These four regions are in addition four general-purpose Azure regions that Microsoft plans to create in France and Korea. Microsoft now has 30 cloud regions around the world, compared with AWS’ 14. This discrepancy is something that Microsoft executives like bringing up. There are also two dedicated U.S. government regions (in Virginia & Iowa) compared with AWS’ one (in California).
Zander wrote, “[O]ur bicoastal, government only datacenters offer data replica in multiple locations throughout the country for business continuity.” “By comparison, another major cloud provider offers only one government cloud region in Pacific Northwest.”
It is important to note that the differences in their definitions of “region” can make comparing the region counts of these two companies difficult. Microsoft uses the term to describe a single location with one or more datacenters. Microsoft claims it has more than 100 cloud datacenters. However, this does not indicate how many are located in each region. AWS uses the term “region” to describe a single area that contains one or several availability zones. These availability zones contain one or many datacenters. One argument could be made to argue that AWS’ availability zone is more similar to Microsoft’s.
Barr, AWS, pointed out the distinction in his blog, citing “some industry confusion about the difference between regions and Availability Zones of Late.”
AWS lists its regions here, and Microsoft lists its Azure regions here.
AWS and Microsoft have been comparing their cloud’s public sector credentials. AWS reported earlier this month that its cloud is being used by approximately 7,000 educational, 22,000 non-profit, and 2,300 government institutions. Microsoft’s Zander countered Tuesday, stating that the Azure Government Cloud is used daily by approximately 6 million people in 7,000 organizations at different levels of government.
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