Microsoft is adding more functionality to its South African Azure data centres, announcing on Tuesday that “Azure Availability Zones” are now available in SA North, its data centre in Johannesburg.
Microsoft became the first “hyperscale” cloud provider to deploy data centres in South Africa, making facilities available in Johannesburg and Cape Town (SA West) in 2019.
“Essentially, Azure Availability Zones serve as an additional way for organisations in South Africa to guarantee uptime and continuous access to critical data, applications and workloads,” Microsoft said in a statement.
“They significantly reduce the risk of ‘impacting’ events such as infrastructure disruptions, as well as improve recovery time and recovery points – to when data was last backed up.”
Several South African businesses have already been working with Microsoft ahead of the launch of the service, allowing them to create “highly resilient, highly available architectures for modern cloud applications and workloads”, the company said.
“This investment in local infrastructure, and continuously expanding and improving the services we provide to our customers, will accelerate digital innovation in the country by enabling businesses to become more agile and competitive. This in turn will help unlock economic growth for the country more broadly,” said Microsoft South Africa Cloud and Enterprise Group lead Johannes Kanis in the statement.
“The expansion of cloud infrastructure in South Africa will further build the capability of South African organisations of all sizes and support the implementation and migration of their businesses to the cloud. It will also help them maintain data residency and meet compliance and regulatory requirements.”
