Microsoft’s first two data centres in Africa will be in South Africa

Microsoft has announced that it will soon open its first two data centres in Africa. They will be located in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

According to Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group for Microsoft, in a blog, “Few places in the world are as dynamic and diverse as Africa today.” “In this landscape, we see enormous opportunity for the cloud to accelerate innovation, support people across the continent who are working to transform their businesses, explore new entrepreneurship opportunities and help solve some of the world’s hardest problems.”

“For these reasons, I’m very excited to share our plans to deliver the Microsoft Cloud from datacenters in Africa.”

Microsoft plans to deliver the Microsoft Cloud — including Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 — from datacenters located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with initial availability in 2018. These new Microsoft Cloud regions will offer enterprise-grade reliability and performance combined with data residency.

This means that Microsoft will have 40 cloud regions around the world — more than any other cloud provider — and will help organizations and people from Cairo to Cape Town accelerate their journey to cloud computing.