Regions
A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.

With more global regions than any other cloud provider, Azure gives customers the flexibility to deploy applications where they need to. Azure is generally available in 52 regions around the world, with plans announced for 6 additional regions.

Geographies
A geography is a discrete market, typically containing two or more regions, that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries.

Geographies allow customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close. Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to our dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure.

Availability Zones
Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with high availability and low-latency replication.

Resiliency to build with confidence
Azure regions, geographies, and Availability Zones form the foundation of Microsoft's global infrastructure—providing customers high availability, disaster recovery, and backup.

Azure Storage offers a massively scalable object store for data objects, a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store. Azure Storage is:

■ Durable and highly available. Redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. You can also opt to replicate data across datacenters or geographical regions for additional protection from local catastrophe or natural disaster. Data replicated in this way remains highly available in the event of an unexpected outage.
■ Secure. All data written to Azure Storage is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data.
■ Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today's applications.
■ Managed. Microsoft Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues for you.
■ Accessible. Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides client libraries for Azure Storage in a variety of languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and others, as well as a mature REST API. Azure Storage supports scripting in Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI. And the Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer offer easy visual solutions for working with your data.

Top benefits of Azure :
1. Speed
2. Agility
3. Global presence
4. Integrated development environment
5. End-to-end delivery pipeline
6. Superior disaster recovery
7. Flexible expenditure
8. Enterprise security
9. Leading Compliance
10. Azure Stack

Speed is critical to businesses of all types and is a key marker of competitive advantage. In the context of this Azure benefit, speed is prevalent across three key areas such as the speed of deployment, speed of operation and speed of scalability.