Microsoft’s cloud sales continued to be a bright spot during the pandemic as revenue from Azure grew 48% year over year during the first quarter of its fiscal 2021.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s larger commercial cloud business generated $15.2 billion, up 31% from $11.6 billion a year ago. “We’re off to a strong start in fiscal 2021 driven by the continued strength of our commercial cloud,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on an earnings call with investors.

This week will see all three top cloud providers report their quarterly earnings, with Microsoft being the first and Amazon and Google happening on Thursday.

Overall the software giant said revenue grew 12% year over year to $37.2 billion, and it generated a net income of $13.9 billion during Q1. This represents a 30% profit increase compared to a year ago.

Microsoft famously doesn’t put a dollar amount on its Azure public cloud revenue, but its 48% growth follows a 47% year-over-year increase during its fiscal fourth quarter and a 61% increase in fiscal Q3 2020.

“I was pleased to see Azure steady at 48% growth after its decline last quarter,” wrote Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights and Strategy, in a comment on Microsoft’s Q1 results. “Even though investors were thinking about the SAP earnings disaster earlier this week, I expected Microsoft to have a solid Q1 and it delivered big time by beating expectations. Enterprises are transitioning from Covid-19 triage to starting to renew their digital transformation plans with a focus on hybrid work. Microsoft is taking advantage of this phenomenon.”

In fact, Nadella touted Microsoft’s hybrid cloud services during his prepared remarks on the Q1 call.

“We’re building Azure as the world’s computer with more data center regions than any other provider,” he said, noting that the No. 2 cloud provider now has 66 Azure data center regions globally. “We’re expanding our hybrid capabilities so that organizations can seamlessly build, manage, and deploy their applications anywhere. With Arc, customers can extend Azure management and deploy Azure data services on premise, at the edge, or in multi-cloud environments. With Azure SQL Edge, we’re bringing SQL data engine to IoT devices for the first time. And with Azure Space, we are partnering with SpaceX and SES to bring Azure compute anywhere on the planet.”

Looking ahead to its fiscal Q2, Microsoft forecast between $39.5 billion and $40.4 billion in revenue.

Despite a second wave of COVID-19 related lockdowns in Europe, and health officials predicting a “dangerous” winter with higher growth rates in the United States, Nadella told investors that he doesn’t expect any cloud computing supply chain problems ahead. He noted an “initial rush” earlier in the pandemic as companies moved their workloads and services to the public cloud in a matter of weeks. “We did have demand surges that we needed to work through on our supply chain,” Nadella said. “We feel very good right now on how that supply is working to support the demand.”