-Microsoft’s new
investment will provide highly available, scalable, and secure cloud services
across Africa with the option of data residency in South Africa
Microsoft has revealed plans to deliver the complete,
intelligent Microsoft Cloud for the first time from datacentres located in
Africa. This new investment is a major milestone in the company’s mission to
empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more, and
a recognition of the enormous opportunity for digital transformation in Africa.
Expanding on existing investments, Microsoft will deliver
cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, from
datacentres located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa with initial
availability anticipated in 2018. The new cloud regions will offer
enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with data residency to
help enable the tremendous opportunity for economic growth, and increase access
to cloud and internet services for organisations and people across the African
continent.
“We’re excited by the growing demand for cloud services in
Africa and their ability to be a catalyst for new economic opportunities,” said
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft
Corp. “With cloud services ranging from intelligent collaboration to predictive
analytics, the Microsoft Cloud delivered from Africa will enable developers to
build new and innovative apps, customers to transform their businesses, and
governments to better serve the needs of their citizens.”
Expanding Access & Opportunity: Currently many companies
in Africa rely on cloud services delivered from outside of the continent. Microsoft’s
new investment will provide highly available, scalable, and secure cloud
services across Africa with the option of data residency in South Africa. With
the introduction of these new cloud regions, Microsoft has now announced 40
regions around the world – more than any major cloud provider. The combination
of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will
connect businesses with opportunity across the globe, help accelerate new
investments, and improve access to cloud and internet services for people and
organisations from Cairo to Cape Town.
“We greatly value Microsoft’s commitment to invest in cloud
services delivered from Africa. Standard Bank already relies on cloud
technology to provide our customers with a seamless experience,” says Brenda
Niehaus, group CIO at Standard Bank. “To achieve success as a business, we need
to keep pace with market developments as well as customer needs, and Office 365
empowers us to make a culture shift towards becoming a more dynamic
organisation, whilst Azure enables us to deliver our apps and services to our
customers in Africa. We’re looking forward to achieving even more with the
cloud services available here on the continent.”
Investing in African Innovation: This announcement expands
on ongoing investments in Africa, where organisations are using currently
available cloud and mobile services as a platform for innovation in health
care, agriculture, education, and entrepreneurship. Microsoft has been working
to support local start-ups and NGOs, unleashing innovation that has the
potential to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity, such as the
scarcity of water and food, and economic and environmental sustainability. One
start-up, M-KOPA Solar, provides affordable pay-as-you-go solar energy to over
500,000 homes using mobile and cloud technology. AGIN has built an app
connecting 140,000 smallholder farmers to key services, enabling them to share
data and facilitating $1.3 million per month in finance, insurance and other
services.
Across Africa, Microsoft has brought 728,000 small and
mid-size enterprises (SMEs) online to help them transform and modernise their
businesses, and over 500,000 are now utilising Microsoft cloud services, with
17,000 using the 4Afrika hub to promote and grow their businesses. The
Microsoft Cloud is also helping Africans build job skills, with 775,000 trained
on subjects ranging from digital literacy to software development. We
anticipate the Microsoft Cloud from Africa will fuel extensive new
opportunities for our 17,000 regional partners and customers alike.
“This development broadens the options available to us in
our modernisation journey of Government ICT infrastructure and services. It
allows us to take advantage of new opportunities to develop innovative
government solutions at manageable costs, as well as drive overall improvements
in operations management, while improving transparency and accountability,”
says Dr. Setumo Mohapi, CEO at SITA.
The Microsoft Trusted Cloud: Microsoft has deep expertise
protecting data, championing privacy, and empowering customers around the globe
to meet extensive security and privacy requirements. With Microsoft’s Trusted
Cloud principles of security, privacy, compliance, transparency, and the
broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry,
Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure supports over a billion customers and 20
million businesses around the globe.
“By establishing hyperscale cloud datacentre capacity in
South Africa, Microsoft is directly addressing customers’ concerns, and
demonstrating commitment to the delivery of cloud services within the country
and the region as a whole,” says Jon Tullett, senior research manager, IDC MEA.
“The presence of local facilities will be greatly encouraging to South African
customers, particularly those in regulated industries such as financial
services and the public sector where data sovereignty concerns are paramount.
This is a strongly positive development for the cloud industry in Africa, and
particularly Microsoft’s ecosystem of partners, ISVs and customers.”
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