Microsoft Azure Expansion Program

2020: Announcement of Azure Expansion Program

On October 2, 2020 the Ministry of digital transformation of Ukraine and Microsoft signed the memorandum of cooperation within which the American corporation is going to construct two data centers in the country and to invest there in development of the cloud business about $500 million.

Mintsifra and Microsoft agreed about implementation of the Azure Expansion Program program designed to implement innovations based on cloud computing for different government institutions, the state enterprises and the government of Ukraine. Within this program of Microsoft and Mintsifra will cooperate for start of a number of the initiatives providing a highly protected cloud platform including innovations, profitable cost of services, strategy implementation of data protection and creation of new jobs.

For implementation of an initiative of digital transformation for public sector and commercial enterprises, Microsoft intends to provide technology support which will help to show possibilities of use of Azure Cloud, says Mintsifra.

Microsoft will construct two data centers in Ukraine and invests $0.5 billion in development of cloud services in the country

Also within the agreement the Ukrainian state institutions should receive discounts for use Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and other cloud services. The discount will also be available to educational and other projects.

At a joint briefing with Microsoft Mintsifra's head Mikhail Fedorov said that the government considers the possibility to transfer data of Diya service 2.0 to Microsoft Azure cloud.

We pay special attention to data storage in our country. We do not want that sensativny data were stored in other countries, – Fedorov said.

According to him, within cooperation with Microsoft will involve about 100 thousand new IT specialists in the next three years in development of cloud services.^[1]

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