Microsoft announced on Monday that it plans to build its first Azure data center in France this year as part of its $3 billion investment for building cloud services in Europe. The company today also launched a new publication dubbed, Cloud for Global Good with no fewer than 78 public policy recommendations in 15 categories such as data protection and accessibility issues. TechCrunch adds:The new expansion, investment and “trust” initiative were revealed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was speaking at an event in Dublin, Ireland. He said that the expansion would mean that Microsoft covers “more regions than any other cloud provider… In the last year the capacity has more than doubled.” As a measure of how Microsoft and Amazon are intent on levelling each other on service availability right now, the news of the French data center comes one month after Amazon announced that it would also be building a data center in France. Nadella, of course, did not mention AWS by name but that is the big elephant in the room for Microsoft. Nadella said today that Microsoft has data centers covering 30 regions across the globe, “more regions than any other cloud provider,” with the European footprint including Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella, currently on a whirlwind tour of Europe, says that Microsoft has now invested over $3 billion in cloud infrastructure in Europe, and will extend that to governance-friendly French data centers in 2017. The company has also released a new publication calling for 78 policy reviews in 15 sectors of Cloud, including an overhaul of the verbose and opaque way that end-users are required to click legal agreements over data, some of which are specious and others of which are critical: “Because data is now collected and used in so many different ways, people can be overwhelmed if constantly presented with privacy choices and requests to consent to data collection. Requiring express consent in every situation could also make it difficult to understand which situations raise serious privacy implications and which are trivial.”

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Expands Azure Data Centers To France, Launches Trust Offensive vs AWS, Google