Huawei is preparing for a March launch for its cloud data services in Africa, it said on Wednesday.
The company is working with South African partners for the construction of the data centres in Johannesburg initially and later Cape Town, it said in a statement.
“Huawei will deploy localised public cloud services based on local industry policies, customer requirements and partner conditions,” it said.
The cloud service will be available to organisations in South Africa and neighbouring countries, offering lower-latency, reliable and secure cloud services. Huawei said the service will be ready for trial use from next week based on the local data centre.
The planned launch comes after Microsoft missed a self-imposed deadline to launch two Azure data centres in South Africa by the end of 2018, one in Johannesburg and the other in Cape Town.
The software company first announced its plans to build the data centres — the first Azure facilities in Africa — in May 2017. It said at the time that “initial availability” of the Microsoft Cloud, delivered directly from the local data centres, would happen in 2018. It was expected that this initial launch would provide Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 services to local customers.
‘Right solutions’
“We’re focused on building the right solutions for our customers and are working towards availability of our new enterprise-grade cloud data centres in South Africa in 2019,” Microsoft South African spokeswoman Ashleigh Fenwick told TechCentral last month.
Microsoft’s biggest global cloud computing rival, the Amazon.com-owned Amazon Web Services, has also announced it plans to open data centres in South Africa, with the first to go live next year in Cape Town.
The new AWS “infrastructure region” will be launched in the first half of 2020 and will allow customers to run workloads in South Africa and serve end users across the African continent with lower latency, Amazon said in a statement in October 2018. — © 2019 NewsCentral Media