Microsoft is hoping to expand its presence in the nation’s nascent but fast-growing cloud service market, launching two data centers here by 2017.

Its Korean operations said its two centers in Seoul and Busan will be operated from September 2017. The company did not specify the location and size of the facilities, citing privacy of corporate clients. 

“We had some limitations in meeting local demands in the Korean market. In order to offer more quality cloud services, we have decided to build data centers exclusively for Korean clients,” said Microsoft Korea CEO Alfred Koh.

“When the new centers are fully operated, we will offer our best enterprise-grade, hyper-scale cloud services in Korea.”

Microsoft is making a big push to expand the global footprint of its Azure cloud platform. The Korean centers are the latest addition to its current 24 data centers operated globally.

The company will offer its Azure public cloud services and its Office 365 hosted applications from these facilities, meeting data sovereignty demands from customers and making it faster for them to access its cloud.

Last year, Azure owned 9 percent of the global cloud service market, following Amazon Web Service with 31 percent. Amazon also launched its own data center in Seoul in January.

Microsoft’s Seoul center is expected to lease space from local telecom carrier LG Uplus’ data center in Pyeongchon, Gyeonggi Province. But the company declined to confirm this

For the Busan center, the company said it has signed a separate deal with the city government to purchase a site.

The two facilities are also expected to work as each other’s back-up server in case of emergencies.

Even though cloud computing services are still in their infancy, demand for them is soaring among tech companies. Korea is a key market, as many companies want to store data in their home country.

Microsoft said it would continue its partnership with the Korean government to offer more transparent services that meet local regulations.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)