Microsoft Azure has a brand-new region, as the company has officially turned on two new data centres in Norway, becoming the first of the major cloud providers to offer enterprise-grade services in the country.

Dubbed Norway East and Norway West, the two new data centres are located in Oslo and Stavangar, and represent the 52nd region on Microsoft’s Azure platform. That puts Microsoft even further ahead of Amazon Web Services, which boasts just 22 regions worldwide.

The Nordics have become a popular spot with data centre operators, with Google opting for data centres in both Denmark and Finland, while Amazon officially opened a Swedish data centre late last year. Now, with Microsoft’s new data centres in Norway, at least one of the big cloud providers operate in every Nordic country.

That’s great news for businesses in the region, who can now benefit from the cloud, while continuing to comply with local laws and regulations. DNB, Equinor, Lånekassen, and Posten are just some of Microsoft Azure’s customers who will be set to take advantage of the company’s expansion to Norway.

“Our customers have entrusted us to protect, operate, and develop our platform in a way that keeps their data private and secure. This is an immense responsibility that we can’t just claim, but a responsibility that we must earn every single day,” noted Brad Smith, president, Microsoft.

Alf Otterstad, executive vice president, Group IT, at DNB Group, Norway’s largest financial services group, noted, “The possibility of data residency was a decisive factor in choosing Microsoft’s data centre regions. Now we are looking forward to using the cloud to modernise and achieve efficiency and agility in order to ensure the best experience for our customers.”

The new cloud regions in Norway are targeted to expand in 2020 with Office 365, and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the next generation of intelligent business applications and tools. Microsoft also plans to expand Azure to even more regions of the world going forward.