Microsoft Corp. last week switched on the first availability zones for its Azure cloud platform, providing new backup and reliability options for customers running workloads in its data centers in Iowa and Paris.

The move follows an announcement last year that the company was introducing availability zones in preview. In a blog post Friday, Tom Keane, Microsoft’s head of global infrastructure, said the Iowa (U.S. Central) and Paris (France Central) regions each have three availability zones at launch.

Availability zones are a resiliency feature. They’re isolated and fault-tolerant locations within a data center region, each with their own power source, cooling and networking infrastructure, that serve as a defense against outages in their particular region.

Enterprises that use cloud services are increasingly beginning to see such features as an essential requirement to be able to run mission-critical workloads. The availability zones don’t just guarantee uptime, but also help preserve data should any major problems arise.

Previously, Microsoft has offered something called redundancy protection within its Availability Sets. It also provides isolated virtual machines within its data centers to isolate individual workloads from hardware failures, and Region Pairs, which match VMs across two regions within the same geographical area to hedge against natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Microsoft’s rivals, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Oracle Corp., have all offered availability zones for some time already, meaning the Redmond, Washington-based company is playing catch up here.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said the addition of availability zones was long overdue by Microsoft, but nonetheless provides the company with an opening to fuel more rapid growth of its cloud platform. That’s because it comes at a time when companies are under increasing pressure to adhere to new privacy rules such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, he said.

“The number of availability zones gives Microsoft now a good opportunity to leverage the data residency and privacy requirements necessary for Azure growth, especially with GDPR in the wings,” Mueller said.

In his blog post, Keane failed to address why its taken Microsoft so long to add these new features. However, his comments suggest the company is looking to catch up with its rivals fast.

“Moving forward, we’re committed to bringing Availability Zones to additional geographies to allow customers to create a comprehensive business continuity strategy with data residency,” Keane wrote.

The executive added that Microsoft has an advantage as its availability zones will provide “industry-leading” 99.99 percent service-level agreement when virtual machines are running in two Availability Zones in the same region.

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