Telecommunications company Seacom, which operates an undersea cable system along Africa’s east coast, has signed a deal with Microsoft to allow its customers to connect directly via dedicated Ethernet links to the software giant’s Azure and Office 365 data centres around the world.
Under the deal, the privately owned Seacom has been appointed as a Microsoft ExpressRoute partner.
The deal will help companies in Africa that are migrating some or all of their business applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud, Seacom said.
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, does not operate from a data centre in South Africa, meaning local organisations wanting to use it must connect to one or more of the company’s data centres around the world.
ExpressRoute connections don’t go over the public Internet, Seacom said. They offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical public Internet connections, it said.
“Since Microsoft does not yet have Azure data centres in Africa, a dedicated, high-quality connection to Azure services hosted in Europe or other parts of the world can ensure a smoother, faster experience for the end user,” Seacom said.
“Because we can control the infrastructure from the last kilometre of the fibre to our many points of presence in the world’s largest Internet traffic exchange points, we can ensure our clients use Azure as naturally as if it was an extension of their own IT infrastructure,” said Seacom global product head Robert Marston. — © 2016 NewsCentral Media