Microsoft Opens its Data Center in South Africa to deliver Azure Cloud Services

Microsoft announced that it has opened its first enterprise-grade data center for Azure cloud in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. This marks as a first for any major global cloud services provider to launch cloud services from the Africa region.

According to Amazon Web Services global-infrastructure, AWS plans to open its Cape Town (South Africa) data center in 2020.  Reuters recently reported that Huawei also plans to build new data centers in South Africa to expand its cloud services.

In a blog post, Corporate Vice President, Azure Global, Microsoft Azure, Tom Keane, said, "The new regions provide the latest example of our ongoing investment to help enable digital transformation and advance technologies such as AI, cloud, and edge computing across Africa. By delivering the comprehensive Microsoft Cloud — comprising Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 — from datacenters in a given geography, we offer scalable, available, and resilient cloud services to companies and organizations while meeting data residency, security, and compliance needs. "


The blog announcement noted that Azure is the first of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud services available out of newly introduced datacenters in South Africa. Other services like Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity solution will be available by the third quarter of the calendar year 2019 while Dynamics 365, the next generation of intelligent business applications, is anticipated for the fourth quarter.

The launch of South Africa data centers brings Microsoft's overall data center footprint to 54 regions across the world.