South Africa businesses have welcomed the opening of the new Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in Cape Town.
The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region expands the hyperscale cloud provider’s global footprint to 73 Availability Zones in 23 geographic regions.
“The cloud is positively transforming lives and businesses across Africa and we are honored to be a part of that transformation,” says Peter DeSantis, senior vice-president: global infrastructure and customer support at Amazon Web Services.
“We have a long history in South Africa and have been working to support the growth of the local technology community for over 15 years. In that time, builders, developers, entrepreneurs, and organisations have asked us to bring an AWS Region to Africa and today we are answering these requests by opening the Cape Town Region.”
The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region has three Availability Zones, which comprise of one or more data centres located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking.
The launch of AWS Africa Region in Cape Town represents a great opportunity for Africa to strengthen the speed and reliability of connectivity, create jobs and optimise workloads.
This is according to Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems, believes the resource will certainly boost the local economy, with job creation among the main benefits.
“This has created local jobs and will have a profoundly positive impact in our country and on our economy. It’s something to support and be immensely proud of.”
Grant Bingham MD of Autumn Leaf in partnership with Obsidian, says the South African and African markets can look forward to access to a range of services that were previously unavailable.
Teraco has been an AWS Direct Connect partner since 2017 and AWS Direct Connect is available in Teraco’s Johannesburg and Cape Town data centre facilities. With over 250 network providers located at these facilities, AWS is within Africa’s reach.
AWS Direct Connect is accessible via a direct cross-connect within Teraco through the Africa Cloud Exchange platform. This platform offers predictable, high performance, SLA based connections.
Jan Hnizdo, Teraco CEO, says that AWS Africa’s presence will significantly impact Africa based enterprise and local cloud service providers enabling them to deliver better end-user experiences.
“Lower latency and increased resilience will enhance the overall user experience and AWS in Africa will assist in meeting clients’ data locality and sovereignty requirements,” he says.
“Africa is fundamental to any global footprint, and also holds the promise of significant growth and immense user uptake over the next decade. Of significance is the role of the Internet and cloud deployments within Africa, and how improved access and affordability will assist sectors such as agriculture, communications, education, and financial services to prosper and grow.”
Synthesis Software Technologies is an AWS partner supporting the region opening and is providing special launch offers.
“We are committed to driving innovation in African businesses, in particular to partnering with customers to deliver the features, functionality and security their end-customers love and at a pace that keeps their customers engaged and loyal to their offerings”, says Darryl Govender, head of Synthesis Cloud Services.