DocuSign Taps Microsoft Azure for Canadian Cloud

Electronic signature technology provider DocuSign announced on Wednesday at the Microsoft Build 2017 conference in Seattle that it has selected Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud vendor to help it scale and extend its reach to Canada.

The announcement comes as it has launched its Invest for Canada initiative that focuses on serving the needs of the Canadian public and private sectors, the company said. Laws in Canada dictate the personally-identifiable information used in digital transactions is kept in Canada during transmission and at rest, DocuSign said.

Last week, DocuSign said that it has grown its user base 135 percent year-over-year, and has more than 300,000 customers and more than 200 million users. The company ended its lengthy search for a new CEO in June when it appointed Dan Springer to fill the spot.

“We’re in the business of bringing people to agreement digitally, then helping them honor and deliver on those agreements,” Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign said in a statement. “To do that in as many countries as possible for as many users as possible, we need the agility to ramp up our cloud services quickly and efficiently to meet varying demands. We already have a strong carrier-grade private cloud infrastructure in place in many markets. But in choosing Microsoft Azure we have access to a highly secure, global cloud that offers data redundancy in multiple in-country locations for business continuity – something that’s an absolute prerequisite for us given we operate a high-availability business.”

DocuSign said that the Azure partnership will give it data centers across two locations (Toronto and Quebec City) in Canada, ensuring that the personally-identifiable information (PII) stays in the country. The services in Canada will come online later this year, according to the company.

The company also hinted at the possibility that the partnership with Microsoft would extend to help it meet the needs of customers around the world.

“We have a deep partnership with DocuSign, and appreciate the company’s collaboration in helping to develop, test and deploy a Managed Instance option within the Azure SQL Database service,” Scott Guthrie, EVP of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft said in a statement. “The advanced features and the scaling requirements of the DocuSign platform help to bolster Azure’s enterprise-proven scale, availability, security and performance even further for our mutual customers.”