When Amazon announced they were opening an AWS region in Sweden, I asked where they were going to expand next. If you look at their map, there’s a continent shaped hole. Amazon didn’t take the hint, but Microsoft seems to be onboard. The company announced they will be opening up data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg, starting in 2018.
This should provide much lower latency for African organizations, and make cloud adoption a lot more feasible. I’m not surprised that the data centers will be based out of South Africa, but wouldn’t be surprised if either Kenya or Nigeria are next for deployment by some public cloud provider on the continent.
This is a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to get an advantage with Azure in the market early, and should hopefully push for a response from either Google or Amazon. More investment means more business opportunities in the area, looking forward to see how this move will influence the burgeoning tech hubs in South Africa.
Paul Sawers comments:
Microsoft has been slowly transitioning into becoming a cloud company, and its recent financials indicate that it’s on the right trajectory. As things stand, Microsoft has myriad cloud regions across North America, Europe, and Asia, with a smattering in Australasia and Latin America. The Middle East and Africa were conspicuously absent in Microsoft’s lineup, so today’s news is a notable step forward for the company.
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