Just months before Microsoft is expected to launch two Azure data centres in South Africa, one in Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Teraco Data Environments, which operates the largest vendor-neutral data centres in Africa, has announced it will be a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connectivity partner.
The deal will mean high-speed connectivity between the Azure data centres and Teraco’s facilities and clients.
“Teraco will be one of the first companies to offer access to the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute sites in Africa, when Azure becomes generally available in 2018,” the company said in a statement on Thursday morning. “Clients will be able to connect directly to Azure ExpressRoute via the Teraco Cloud Exchange in both Johannesburg and Cape Town.”
The company said that reliable and predictable network performance are essential for the successful implementation of a hybrid cloud strategy, as applications are expected to operate seamlessly between private and public cloud environments.
“Research from IDG Connect has shown that while organisations want to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and cost savings of the public cloud, they are uneasy about migrating further workloads due to concerns around connectivity, security and application performance. Significantly, respondents stated they would move 69% more workloads to the cloud if connectivity and security issues were resolved.”
Through the addition of Azure ExpressRoute, via the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform, businesses and service providers can now establish high-performance connections to Azure facilities.
Teraco CEO Lex van Wyk said the growth in hybrid cloud — where companies make use of a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party public cloud services — has driven a need for a secure connection between public cloud providers and physical data centres.
“Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute … meets the significant demands of our co-located enterprise and service provider customers, who are building hybrid solutions based on Microsoft cloud technologies.”
Teraco’s Cloud Exchange is an infrastructure platform located in its co-location centres, allowing customers to build and manage private connections to multiple clouds over a single physical connection.
“We have invested in Teraco’s exchange to enable immediate activation of secure connections from our clients to Azure ExpressRoute,” Van Wyk said. Clients will be able to peer via Teraco’s NAPAfrica peering point or connect via Teraco Cloud Exchange within the data centre, depending on their business models. — © 2017 NewsCentral Media
