Microsoft is excited to announce our plans to deliver the complete, intelligent Microsoft Cloud, for the first time, from datacenters located on the African continent.
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. It is also recognition of the enormous opportunity for digital transformation in Africa, and a development we hope to work very closely with our partners and customers on. Expanding on existing investments, Microsoft will deliver cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, directly from datacentres located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with initial availability anticipated in 2018. These 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.
Expanding Access & Opportunity: Through these datacentres, Microsoft will provide highly available, scalable and secure cloud services across Africa, with the option of data residency in South Africa. The combination of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will connect our customers 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. With the introduction of these new cloud regions, Microsoft has now announced 40 regions around the world – more than any major cloud provider.
The Microsoft Trusted Cloud: Microsoft has deep expertise protecting data, championing privacy, and empowering customers to meet extensive security and privacy requirements. With Microsoft’s Trusted Cloud principles of security, privacy, compliance and transparency, as well as 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.
Investing in African Innovation: This announcement expands on ongoing investments in Africa, where our customers, empowered by Microsoft and our partners, 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. Across Africa, Microsoft has brought 728,000 small and mid-size enterprises online to help them transform their businesses, and over 500,000 are using the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft 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, and we look forward to embarking on this journey together.
Source : Microsoft