Been a while since we’ve heard more on the two datacenters that Microsoft was opening for its Azure cloud platform in Africa. It was more than a year ago, in fact.
These two new locations were said to be based in South Africa.
South Africa North in Johannesburg and South Africa West in Cape Town.
Microsoft made the announcement in May 2017, and now some 18 months later, we have an update on the matter. Lionel Moyal, Director of Commercial Partners, Microsoft South Africa, is here with the good news that the two new Azure datacenter regions are due to go live within weeks.
At most, at the end of 2018.
He was speaking to entrepreneurs and startups at the Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018 in South Africa about the company’s new Head Start initiative. According to Lionel, latency will not be an issue anymore, not just for South Africa, but the whole of the African continent.
A cloud for Africa, so to say.
This, he opined, will encourage workers to skill up in cloud technologies, machine learning, AI, mobile technologies and development tools. Furthermore, he expects South Africa to add 112,000 IT specific jobs by the year 2022.
Speaking of years, AWS also recently revealed, in October 2018, that it planned to open its very own datacenters in South Africa by 2020. Huawei, too, just ended the AfricaCom 2018 event by unveiling Huawei Cloud in South Africa.
Things sure are heating up.
