Microsoft India on Wednesday announced new Azure availability zones in its central India data centre region, providing additional resiliency and redundancy for customer workloads on its cloud.

Azure availability zones are physically and logically separated data centres with their own independent power source, network, and cooling.

If one becomes unavailable, the others ensure resiliency.

According to the company, the new Azure availability zones in Pune ensures uptime of up to 99.99 per cent, empowering Microsoft customers in India to spread their infrastructure and applications across the data centres' locations, increasing security and accessibility.

"We are continually upgrading the infrastructure in India to provide support for customers building and operating applications and workloads," said Rajiv Sodhi, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India.

"From facilitating architectures for modern cloud applications, to meeting data residency requirements, the new Azure Availability Zones in Central India will bring resilience to businesses, as they accelerate digital transformation," he added.

Azure availability zones allow businesses to spread their infrastructure and applications across dispersed data centres, delivering additional protection and isolation from localised failures, which can range from mechanical or electrical issues, structure fires or flooding, or any unforeseen disaster.

Microsoft said it evaluates more than 30 viability and risk-based criteria which are considered to determine the configuration of availability zones.

"We believe this launch of a new Azure Central India Availability Zones from Microsoft will further enhance the resiliency and availability of mission-critical applications for us, as well as our clients in the region," said Abhijit Mazumder, VP and Chief Information Officer, Tata Consultancy Services.