Put your head within the cloud: Microsoft unveils immersive digital tour for deep dive on knowledge facilities

As you point and click your way around various aspects of your digital life today, whether you’re hosting a virtual work meeting or playing a video game, save some time for a new immersive experience from Microsoft which helps explain how it all works, thanks to “the cloud.”

The tech giant’s new virtual data center tour is a deep dive on the inner workings and infrastructure of a typical Microsoft data center. Viewable on a personal computer or mobile device, the experience walks users through a server room, network room, operations area and innovation room. Along the way there are explainer videos and breakout graphics about the cloud in general, specific technology, sustainability and security.

“It makes the cloud real for people and less high-tech and highfalutin,” Noelle Walsh, a Microsoft corporate vice president who leads the team that builds and operates the company’s cloud infrastructure, said in a story on Microsoft’s website Tuesday.

Microsoft says it operates more than 200 data centers to power its Azure cloud services. The company’s operating and planned data center footprint spans 34 countries around the world all networked together via more than 165,000 miles of subsea, terrestrial and metro optical fiber. There are plans to add data centers in at least 10 more countries this year, and the company is on pace to build between 50 and 100 new data centers each year for the foreseeable future, Walsh said.

The virtual tour is a rare chance to see what’s inside the typically warehouse-sized, windowless, non-descript buildings surrounded by a fence.

“If you were to drive by a data center, you probably wouldn’t know that that was a data center,” Walsh said. “We generally don’t publicize where we are.”