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Amazon Web Services expands its global data center network to Africa. Today the cloud giant announced the opening of an AWS region in Cape Town, South Africa. The data centre should be open by mid-2020 and customers will be able to have their workloads run locally for the first time.

AWS calls a group of data centres that are physically relatively close to each other, but work independently of each other, regions. The region in Cape Town will consist of three locations within the region. The planned data centres are part of a careful expansion in which the cloud giant was slowly but surely laying the foundations for an infrastructure in Africa.

Developments in Africa

In 2015, AWS already opened an office in the South African capital Johannesburg. That was a few years after it set up local business teams. In 2017, AWS brought its Direct Connect cloud service to the country and in May this year, two local CloudFront nodes were opened in South Africa.

With this, AWS has already built up a large customer base in Africa. It will have faster access to AWS services by mid-2020. Because companies are physically closer to the data centres, the delay is smaller. It also simplifies the management of sensitive information and simplifies compliance with local laws and regulations.

Enlargement to Africa

AWS is not the first cloud provider to focus on the African market. Last year, Microsoft announced its intention to open Azure data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg before the end of 2018. IBM also opened its own data centre in South Africa in the course of 2016. Google is the last of the four major cloud providers to have no African plans yet. Nevertheless, given the competitive market, there seems to be a good chance that it will follow quickly with its own plans.

Today, AWS is the largest cloud provider with a market share of 34 percent. Microsoft and Google are the numbers two and three and are seeing greater revenue growth, although the top position of AWS remains undisputed for the time being.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.