Why Microsoft’s data centres in Cape Town and Joburg are a big deal
Microsoft’s plans to build hyperscale data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg to deliver a range of cloud services, is a significant step forward for South Africa’s IT industry, says Seacom.
The software giant said in May that it plans to deliver Microsoft Cloud — including Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 — from data centers located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with initial availability in 2018.
Robert Marston, global head of product at Seacom, said that Microsoft’s decision to locally host cloud services will not only enable it to offer better performance and lower latencies, thereby providing a better end-user experience, but will critically lower the cost barrier for adoption of these services for enterprise customers.
“This represents a significant step forward for South Africa’s IT industry because it means organisations can access Microsoft’s rich selection of cloud services from a local data centre,” he said.
“This will not only give them more reliability, faster speeds and lower latencies than they can get when accessing cloud services from data centres in Europe or the US, but will also cut out international connectivity costs which have typically been a barrier to entry for the move to the cloud.”
According to Seacom, many enterprises have previously chosen private clouds or have worked with local public cloud providers that lack the capabilities of the world’s top cloud computing providers.
“When the Microsoft data centres go live in 2018, enterprises will be able to enjoy the full Azure experience with no performance compromises or hefty data charges,” Marston said.
CIOs will also be reassured that their data is hosted in a local data centre that complies in full with South African data protection laws, he added. “Knowing that the data centres are in Cape Town and Johannesburg rather than Ireland or Germany will give many organisations the confidence to migrate more aggressively to the cloud,” Marston said.
And with Microsoft hosting its cloud services locally, it is only a matter of time before the other cloud providers also start to set up data centres in Africa, said Marston.
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