Microsoft said on Wednesday it has strengthened the scalability of Azure Local and unveiled capabilities that provide a large-scale cloud infrastructure environment allowing deployment of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment.

According to the company, Azure Local, based on Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud, delivers a cloud-consistent infrastructure environment on organisation-owned hardware.

It supports deployments even in environments separated from an internet connection and provides operational control to directly manage security and compliance settings locally. The company stressed this allows organisations to keep control of data while running large-scale workloads across industrial sites in local environments.

It added that Azure Local supports flexible scaling of server deployments from hundreds to thousands within a single sovereign boundary without a separate architectural redesign.

U.S. telecommunications company AT&T adopted Azure Local to secure operational control over mission-critical infrastructure. The Netherlands’ land registry Kadaster is using it to maintain sovereign control over nationally sensitive public data. Italy’s FiberCop is also building Azure Local across edge locations to provide nationwide sovereign cloud and AI services.

Azure Local is currently available through computing and enterprise storage platforms from major global partners including DataON, Dell Technologies, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Lenovo and NetApp.

Douglas Phillips (더글라스 필립스), president and chief technology officer of Microsoft Specialized Cloud, said, "The combination of Azure Local, validated computing and enterprise storage platforms, accelerated computing platforms and chipsets provides a data centre-scale stack that supports sovereign infrastructure deployments." He added, "This helps keep data, models and execution processes securely within an organisation’s controlled environment."