Microsoft announced over a year ago that it would build two new data centers in South Africa. These were locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Lionel Moyal, the Director of Commercial Partners at the company in South Africa, has now announced that the data centers should go live within a few weeks.
Eighteen months have passed, but the data centres should be live by the end of this year. The centres are called “a cloud for Africa” by Moyal. He also said that “latency will no longer be a problem”.
Moyal announced this during Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018 in South Africa to entrepreneurs and startups. Moyal encouraged employees to develop more skills in the cloud, machine learning, AI, mobile technologies, and developer tools. He expects to add 112,000 IT-specific jobs in South Africa by 2022.
Competition
Azure is not the only one to focus on the African market. AWS said in October that it would be making a data centre in Cape Town and IBM already opened its own data centre in South Africa in 2016. Google is the only major cloud provider that does not yet have any African plans, but given the competitive market, there is a good chance that it will soon come up with its own plans.
Earlier this year, Microsoft itself also announced plans for data centers in other countries. There are two centres in Norway, in Oslo and Stavanger. The data centres must be operational by the end of 2019, initially only with Azure supply. Later there will also be support for Office 365 and Dynamics 365.
There are also rumours about two new centres in Germany, which are also aimed at Azure customers of Microsoft. The new locations make it possible to keep the data in Germany. The country has relatively strict privacy laws. The exact location of the data centres is unknown.
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.