Microsoft has tested and launched data centres in all types of location, including underwater ones off the shore of California, but it is finally opening its first facilities in Africa.

The company now announced the general availability of Azure from the new cloud regions in Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa. Azure is the first of Microsoft’s cloud services to be delivered from the new data centres in South Africa.

This also makes Microsoft the first global provider to deliver cloud services from data centres on the African continent.

Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity solution, is anticipated to be available by the third quarter, while Dynamics 365, for intelligent business applications, is anticipated in the fourth quarter.

Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice-president of Azure Networking at Microsoft the combination of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will create greater economic opportunity for organisations in Africa. “It will accelerate new global investment, and improve access to cloud and internet services,” he said.

According to the Cloud Africa 2018 report, cloud use among medium to large organisations in Africa has more than doubled between 2013 and 2018. Due to the benefits of cloud in offering efficiency and scalability, more than 90% of companies surveyed in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria plan to increase their spending on cloud computing in the next year.

Share Story: