Microsoft introduced a new look and feel for Power BI last month, bringing it more in line with other Office 365 applications. The tech giant later also revealed that new solutions brought to the business analytics service were built upon the recently announced Azure Files premium tier.
Now, Microsoft has finally unveiled the first African region for Power BI. Expansion into the continent has begun from the South Africa North region that will be located in the city of Johannesburg.
This new region arrives as a welcome development for independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers using Power BI Embedded. As a result of this, customers will now be able to locate their Power BI deployments closer to their data sources, whether it be in Azure or on-premises. This will lead to lower network egress costs, along with faster data refresh performance. New public cloud customers may now be provisioned to this region, provided their tenant country is located nearby.
With the latest addition, Microsoft"s data visualization service is now available in 19 regions in its public cloud, aside from six regions across its three national clouds. Customers that already have another region selected as their home region may still deploy content to the new location through Multi-Geo support, a feature in Power BI Premium.