Microsoft tackles Safe Harbour as Nadella promises UK commercial cloud data centres for 2016

'We have a bold ambition to not be limited with any type of deployment' says CEO

Microsoft has made a strong play to protect its UK customers from the recent collapse of the Safe Harbour agreement by having its CEO, Satya Nadella, announce dedicated UK and Europe commercial cloud data centres today as part of a $2bn spend on cloud infrastructure in Europe.

Speaking at the company's Future Decoded conference in London today, Nadella announced that Azure and Office 365 will be available from UK-based data centres in late 2016. Dynamics CRM Online availability is due to follow shortly afterwards.

The company is boasting "world-class reliability and performance to government organisations, regulated industries and other businesses", and it says new opportunities for "innovation and local growth" will manifest as a result of the data centre provision.

Microsoft went on to announce that the "latest phase of expansion" of its data centre facilities in Ireland and the Netherlands is now complete.

Nadella was proclaiming his usual cloud-centric message around the announcements, saying Microsoft intends to offer "more data centres than anyone else", and in doing so being able to "deliver on these bold ambitions so we can empower you as users within enterprises more of the technology you need".

"Perhaps the most salient aspect of the cloud is it gives you the feeling of infinite capacity," Nadella continued. "Your ability to aggregate compute, storage and network as a service is what liberates every individual and developer to be able to dream big. That's also [part of] having a bold ambition to not be limited with any type of deployment."

Within this "cloud-first" narrative Nadella also revisited his "mobile-first" message, talking of the next five years in devices, and how mobility (and cloud with it) would play out.

"In five years you'll look at computers we wear on our wrists, have in our eyes, or sensors in conference rooms or around rooms," said Nadella.

"The question we have is what do we do uniquely - what is Microsoft's contribution in this mobile first cloud first world?"

Nadella spelled out "two bold ambitions", the first of which was to "reinvent the mobility and cloud process" to take the resource of people themselves into better consideration.

"What is scarce still is human attention and time," observed Nadella.

"The idea we can create a system both individually and at team level to help allocate that scarce resource wisely, so we can help get everything out of every moment of out life is core to what we think is key to reinventing cloud and mobile."

Nadella said Microsoft dreams of a future where users can "dominate business process in communication tools".

He also flagged up machine learning and "the intelligent cloud", calling these resources "the infrastructure that will fuel the next generation of applications from startups, to small business to large business to public sector".

This, he said, will require "true distributed computing" to prop it up, and will need to be backed by a "hyperscale cloud" that takes into account "the speed of light" as well as power consumption issues.

Nadella described Windows 10 as the "first step" in a journey to join end users and developers from "Raspberry Pi on one end to HoloLens on the other" in a united experience.