Earlier today I received a press release that stated Microsoft intends to deliver the complete, intelligent Microsoft Cloud for the first time from data centres located in Africa. This is HUGE in my opinion given that this sort of thing has not happened before with a major cloud services player like Microsoft.

Apparently Microsoft will deliver cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, from data centres located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa with initial availability anticipated in 2018. The new cloud regions will offer enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with data residency.

I would have loved to hear that this would be coming to key African technology markets like Kenya and Nigeria as well but realistically it could be years before it happens. However, given that Liquid Telecom’s East Africa Data Centre (EADC) got Tier III Certification earlier this week for its data centre by delivering 100% uptime in its electricity supply, cooling systems, and IT systems, it seems to me its only a matter of time before it happens.

The reality is lots of businesses and consumers in Africa are heavy users of a variety of cloud-based services that are generally run out of data centres in Europe and North America. Invariably, this means that bandwidth intensive applications can be slow to access depending how much latency is being experienced on international links.  Therefore, it seems only logical to me that we start seeing more companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Uber having cloud services run of data centres located locally in Africa.