Amazon Web Services’ Direct Connect product is now available through Teraco’s JB1 and CT1 data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Teraco said on Wednesday that the product provides customers with direct access to AWS services in infrastructure regions it operates around the world.

Amazon is the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services for businesses.

The news follows remarks at the weekend by Peter Desantis, AWS’s global head of infrastructure, that it will launch the product this week, a prelude to possibly putting down its own data centre infrastructure in South Africa.

The benefits of AWS Direct Connect are dedicated connectivity to AWS regions, consistent network performance and reduced bandwidth costs, Teraco said in a statement. Direct Connect offers a dedicated network connection that brings robust and secure connectivity between on-premises or co-location environments and the cloud, allowing companies to transfer data via a private connection.

“AWS Direct Connect can be used to access all AWS services in any AWS region globally and create high-performance hybrid infrastructure and provide improved security and efficiency for sensitive workloads,” Teraco said.

AWS Direct Connect is available at Teraco through physical cross-connections in both the Johannesburg and Cape Town data centres and via the Teraco Cloud Exchange.

Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk said the data centre provider now offers immediate activation of secure connections from its clients to AWS. He said clients can peer via the Internet exchange point NAPAfrica or connect via Teraco Cloud Exchange.

With cloud becoming an increasingly important part of the IT landscape, organisations need to manage both on-premises and cloud applications, both in-house and outsourced, Van Wyk said. “Choosing the right deployment methods for specific workloads is essentially creating new network architecture.”

Global network

Desantis told the Sunday Times at the weekend that having AWS Direct Connect in the country will allow customers based in South Africa to have dedicated, reliable and high-bandwidth connectivity to the Amazon global network, bypassing the public Internet.

He told the newspaper that it was only a matter of time before it opened its own data centre facilities in the country.

“Across South Africa, we need to do quite a lot of work to get that infrastructure in place. But we’re excited because we think there’s a lot of business and growth in South Africa and it’s a matter of how quickly we can figure it out.”

Desantis’s remarks came after AWS’s biggest global rival, Microsoft, announced it would build local Azure data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The first cloud technologies to be made available to local businesses and consumers through the data centres are Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365.