You look to the cloud for several reasons – to meet your cloud-first strategy, for scalability or to adapt quickly to changing business demands. Maybe all three.  

Perhaps you need offerings to be available in various regions, or to reduce application response time and improve latency problems. Perhaps regulatory and compliance constraints are limiting (or mandating) the physical locations where your data can be stored and transmitted. This is why having a global data footprint is beneficial. 

An important partnership for modern managed services  

Managed services enable you to better address geographical constraints while staying on current software releases, improving the efficiency and dependability of your software, as well as freeing your IT staff to work on more strategic projects.   

In June, 2020, SAS announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft .  An important aspect of our partnership is the ability to migrate and operate SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The SAS Cloud delivers the value of SAS software in a managed environment. Our hosting model is flexible, offering the opportunity to design a SAS Cloud solution to meet organizations’ unique needs whether it is through a managed application service, software as a service or with our SAS Results offerings that provide access to SAS experts to extend your analytical reach. 

SAS Cloud organizations to get operational in the fastest time possible and keep pace with changing business demands. The SAS Cloud provides an always-on environment, combined with top SAS talent to provide a resilient, highly available analytics environment that just works. The result is increased productivity and reduced risk for critical processes. This enables you to redeploy scarce IT resources to other priorities. 

The result? The Cloud reimagined 

This reimagining of the possibilities of the cloud includes evaluating emerging technologies, from the addition of new services via Azure and new industry techniques that are accelerating the delivery of SAS Cloud services, while keeping operating costs low. 

We have released SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure in Germany, the UK, Brazil and Canada.  The Germany data center will be the primary data center for the EMEA region for storing and managing EU customer data more locally. The UK data center meets the needs of UK and Ireland customers, due to uncertainties associated with Brexit.  And because Latin America is one of our fastest growth areas, it makes sense to have the main data center for that region in Brazil.  

With the opening of these new locations, the SAS cloud on Microsoft Azure is now available in USA (East), Australia (East), Frankfurt, Germany, London, UK, Sau Paulo, Brazil and Canada (Central). In the four months since our partnership announcement that is a huge increase in the SAS and Microsoft Azure data center footprint, benefiting organizations globally. 

Supporting you is our mission 

In addition to expanded datacenter coverage provided by Azure; we continue scaling our global support teams for the SAS Cloud.  The strategy is focused on putting the right resources in closer proximity to you globally, while at the same time making sure our offers remain competitive and meet expectations.   

Starting with the Shared Services Center in Pune, India this team includes highly knowledgeable technical experts that expands the capability of our global SAS installation team and our 24x7 operations and data management teams. 

Then there are the SAS Cloud centers of excellence which are focal points for delivery with locations selected to ensure we are near you. Centers of excellence now exist in the UK, Australia, Brazil and the US – providing improved time zone coverage. The centers of excellence help provide localized language support as well as a more rounded complete service including sales support, technical account management and project management. 

Fresh opportunities  

As we look to 2021, future coverage areas for Microsoft Azure data centers will be driven by you, the customer,  with centers coming to more regions where you need them, coupling that with the shared services centers and centers of excellence, providing reduced deployment times for SAS Cloud coupled with regionalized service, helping drive that time to value. Learn more about SAS Cloud.