Microsoft has announced that it is opening up two brand new data centers in the US. The data centers will be located in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa and mark the company’s first ever foray of the sort on the continent. The company hopes to get them up and running by 2018.
The data centers will come equipped with the capability to offer a slew of cutting edge tools to developers including Azure’s suite of cloud computing tools and productivity tools like Office 365 and Dynamics 365. How this is going to help developers in the region? Well, up until now there weren’t any data centers out there. So devs looking to use these products had t connect to data centers in Europe which, despite all the developments made in long distance transmission of data, led to latency and lags.
So with these data centers, latency issues for devs on the continent will be resolved.
Speaking on the topic, Microsoft’s executive vice president for its Cloud and Enterprise group Scott Guthrie said:
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.
This also means that Microsoft now had 40 data centers running, or announced. To compare this with competitors, Google has merely 8 while Amazon offers 7 data centers with 42 availability zone. And Google and Amazon don’t have any data center in the African continent at present. So yeah, the company has a lead in terms of data centers.
Google has been focusing its attention more on underground cables of late. However, the company plans to aggressively move into the data center space in the near future.
