Microsoft is opening two new data centers in South Africa

As announced by its company officials, Microsoft is planning to open two new data centers in South Africa, specifically in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

With this venture, the software giant would finally address the needs of African customers and recognize the potential for digital transformation through the power of cloud technology.

This is the first data center project of the company in Africa, and it’s estimated that it will get these new regions online by 2018. Aside from investing in the data centers, Microsoft will also deliver cloud services including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365.

When the development of the project is over, Microsoft will directly deliver its mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and it will contribute to a greater entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth to the continent of Africa.

Currently, there are some ongoing investments where organizations are utilizing the existing available cloud as well as mobile services as a platform for innovative projects in entrepreneurship, education, and agriculture.

Microsoft is planning to open two new data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. (Source)

Many companies operating in Africa are using cloud services that are delivered outside of the continent such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, who are servicing customers from their data centers in Europe. Now with this newly announced undertaking, companies are expected to gain highly available, secure and scalable service that can improve their performance.

Even though most of the application users can’t really tell the difference between services provided from distant data centers and locally served, latency remains a big problem for some applications which will be fixed with these new data centers.

Experts agree that Africa is set to become a huge source of technology investment growth over the next 10 years, and the latest move by Microsoft will surely inspire many other technology-based companies to follow their steps and take their businesses here.