Azure is a global cloud platform with data centers distributed across various geographical locations. These data centers are organized into regions, which are essential to how Microsoft ensures high availability, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery for cloud services.
Azure Regions and Region Pairs
A region in Azure is a specific geographic area that contains one or more data centers. Each region offers redundancy, scalability, and availability for Azure services.
- Regions help businesses meet data residency requirements, such as regulations requiring data to remain within a specific geographic boundary (e.g., Europe).
- Azure pairs each region with another region in the same geography, typically at least 300 miles apart. This strategy is known as a region pair.
- Region pairs are designed to enhance high availability and disaster recovery:
- If one region fails or is affected by an outage, services can failover to the paired region.
- In the event of a geographic disaster affecting both regions, Azure prioritizes recovery for one of them.
- Planned updates are intentionally not deployed simultaneously to both regions in a pair to reduce risk.
Understanding region pairs supports disaster recovery planning. For more information on high availability, see AZ-900: Describe the benefits of high availability and scalability in the cloud.
Azure Sovereign Regions
Azure also offers sovereign regions, which are specially isolated Azure environments designed to meet strict national and governmental requirements.
United States Sovereign Regions
- Includes US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, and US Gov Iowa.
- Operated as a separate instance of Azure with additional compliance features.
- Physically and logically network-isolated from other Azure services.
- Staffed and operated by screened US personnel.
- Used by federal, state, and local government agencies, and partners.
- Certified for DoD Level 5 approval.
China Sovereign Regions
- Includes China East and China North, operated in partnership with 21Vianet.
- Microsoft holds less than 50% foreign ownership and does not directly manage the data centers.
- To use these regions, the customer must be a legal entity located in China.
- These regions are disconnected from the rest of Azure’s global infrastructure.
- Not all Azure features are available in these regions.
Germany Sovereign Region
- Microsoft previously operated a sovereign region in Germany. However, this offering closed on October 29, 2021, and customers are now served by standard Azure regions in Germany.
Sovereign regions enable compliance with stringent national and regional regulations and support scenarios where data sovereignty is a top priority.
To explore the structure of Azure’s resource management hierarchy, refer to AZ-900: Describe the hierarchy of resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups.
Conclusion
Azure’s region-based design—including paired and sovereign regions—enhances service resilience, supports legal compliance, and provides businesses with geographic flexibility. Whether your needs involve regulatory requirements, disaster recovery, or government-level security, Azure’s global footprint delivers.
Want to understand how Azure’s global infrastructure supports your business? Start exploring in our AZ-900 video course – or go back to the AZ-900 list of topics.
Please click here to find out more about Microsoft’s AZ-900 exam.
