Geographies

• 3 minutes

Azure divides the world into geographies that are defined by geopolitical boundaries or country borders. An Azure geography is a discrete market typically containing two or more regions that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries. This division has several benefits.

• Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close.
• Geographies ensure that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries.
• Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure.

 Tip

Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization's data or information. It defines the legal or regulatory requirements imposed on data based on the country or region in which it resides and is an important consideration when planning out your application data storage.

Geographies are broken up into the following areas:

• Americas
• Europe
• Asia Pacific
• Middle East and Africa

Each region belongs to a single geography and has specific service availability, compliance, and data residency/sovereignty rules applied to it. Check the documentation for more information (a link is available in the summary unit).