By KiwiCover Insurance Limited

12/26/2014 AUCKLAND, 19 November, 2014 – KiwiCover Insurance has become the first company in New Zealand to fully migrate its information technology platform to the new Microsoft Azure data centres in Australia.

Announced in late October, the data centres in New South Wales and Victoria are the latest addition to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform which now extends to 19 regions worldwide.

Alan Kelly, Managing Director of Wellington-based KiwiCover Insurance, says that prior to the launch of the Australian Azure region, KiwiCover’s IT platform was hosted in the closest available data centre in Singapore.

“During the two-year period in which we used Microsoft Azure services sourced from South East Asia, we have been entirely satisfied. However, with the move to Australia, that level of satisfaction has now taken another step up,” says Mr Kelly.

“Our migration to the Australian data centres delivered everything that it promised. The much lower latency resulted in an instant performance improvement and a superior user experience, especially on mobile devices. The geographically-redundant data centres also provide us with the security and scalability we require, and for which Azure has become renowned.”

Microsoft Azure provides businesses with an integrated range of services including computing, networking, storage, backup, recovery and mobile services. Azure is a leading provider of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and offers service level agreements with guaranteed 99.95% availability.

Kelly says KiwiCover uses a wide range of Microsoft Azure’s available services, including Azure Websites, SQL Database, Blob, Queue and Table Storage, Redis Cache, Application Insights and the Content Delivery Network (CDN). The company also uses Microsoft’s Enterprise Office 365.

“As an online provider of life insurance, health insurance and other types of cover, our customers are looking for a fast, secure, streamlined service, and with the support of Microsoft Azure that’s exactly what we provide.”

Paul Muckleston, Microsoft New Zealand’s Managing Director, says he is thrilled that the Australian Azure data centres are being so well received and utilised already by New Zealand businesses, and extended warm congratulations and thanks to KiwiCover for migrating fully to the local Azure region.

“The great thing about Microsoft Azure is that it frees up business IT so that they can focus on strategic, value added projects while Microsoft manages what’s under the hood,” says Muckleston.

“We look forward to continuing to work with KiwiCover and many other New Zealand enterprises, as Microsoft continues to deliver innovative solutions that fuel growth, drive efficiencies and help people do more and achieve more.”

To see the KiwiCover website running on Microsoft Azure Websites, visit www.kiwicover.co.nz