Why the launch of Azure Belgium Central is a gamechanger for hybrid work and audiovisual systems

11-12-2025 12:19

The opening of Azure Belgium Central on 18 November is far more than a technology update. It represents a structural upgrade of Belgium’s digital landscape — and especially a relief for organisations that, in recent years, have been confronted with choppy video calls, inconsistent meeting rooms, or sluggish digital tools.

Hybrid work is now the norm. Yet companies still face the same frustrations: variable quality, unpredictable performance, and audiovisual systems that work better on some days than others. With a local cloud region, part of these issues finally disappears.

Hybrid meetings become more stable — even at peak moments

Many organisations recognise the issue: meetings that run perfectly during off-peak hours but slow down the moment everyone connects at the same time or when participants join from abroad. This often has nothing to do with the meeting room itself, but with the distance the data needs to travel.

With an Azure region in Belgium, these distances and latencies become significantly shorter. For companies, this mainly means:

• fewer disruptions,
• less audio echo,
• less delay during screen sharing,
• and more consistent quality, regardless of where people work.

It may sound technical, but every employee knows the impact when a meeting simply works as expected.

Faster and more consistent audiovisual systems

Modern work environments are increasingly interconnected: room booking, touchscreens, digital whiteboards, wireless sharing, signage, monitoring… All these systems communicate continuously with the cloud.

When that cloud is closer, users feel it immediately. Organisations already notice that:

• rooms synchronise more quickly with calendars,
• signage updates faster,
• connections start more smoothly,
• and interfaces become more predictable.

For IT and Facility teams, this mainly means one thing: fewer incidents to resolve and fewer performance variations between sites or floors.

Finally, a step toward truly uniform workspaces

Many companies want to provide a consistent user experience across all meeting rooms. In practice, small differences persist: wireless sharing works well here, the touchscreen responds more slowly there, elsewhere content distribution lags.

A local cloud region eliminates some of these variables. Organisations see faster results when they standardise their workspaces: what works well in Antwerp suddenly works just as well in Ghent, Brussels or Liège.

Uniformity finally becomes achievable — even for multi-site companies.

A stronger foundation for growth and scalability

Companies grow, open new meeting rooms, rent additional floors, or adopt more hybrid work modes. In that context, their digital environment must be able to scale quickly.

Azure Belgium Central ensures that growth depends less on local hardware or ageing infrastructure.

For organisations, this translates into:

• meeting rooms deployed more quickly,
• less management complexity,
• greater stability during periods of high activity,
• and fewer unpleasant surprises as teams expand or work differently.

It is a foundation on which modern audiovisual collaboration can finally grow without friction.

More than a tech milestone: a structural shift

The launch of Azure Belgium Central mainly shows that Belgium is catching up in developing digital workplace infrastructure. Companies that have invested in hybrid work and audiovisual solutions in recent years now extract even more value from those choices.

They benefit from:

• greater reliability,
• increased predictability,
• better usability,
• and reduced dependency on foreign data routes.

And this is exactly what IT and Facility teams strive for: a digital environment that is not only well designed, but performs as expected — every single day.

What does this mean for your organisation?

Now that Belgium has a local cloud region, this is the ideal moment to assess whether your meeting rooms, collaboration tools, information displays and office infrastructure are ready to fully benefit from it. Not because the technology must be replaced, but because the conditions are finally right to get the most out of it.

Are you ready to make your hybrid work environment faster, more stable, and more consistent? Contact us at 015 287 487.