When will the Microsoft datacenters open in SA?

Crimson Line was greatly excited when Microsoft announced on 18 May 2017 that they would be opening two datacenters in South Africa. Crimson Line has been cloud advocates for years and we knew this meant that they understood that Africa has economic potential to utilize the digital revolution just like the rest of the world.

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft, said in May that: “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.”

Looking at the Microsoft Azure calculator, we’ve seen that although South Africa isn’t yet an available option, it has been added to the choices available for datacenter locations under Express Route. That’s exciting since it means the opening must be closer than we think. (Microsoft must be testing the functionality, as it’s been taken down since research started for this post.)

What does it mean for our clients?

Clients who are concerned with data residency will be able to utilize cloud services with data storage happening within South Africa’s borders. The impact, especially with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation act being introduced, increases the cloud options available to South African companies.

What does it mean for IT teams?

BC (before cloud in this instance) IT teams only did problem-solving. The cloud offers IT professionals the opportunity to become solution specialists who will be adding to the company’s bottom line when they utilize the right licensing models and applications available to them within Microsoft.

Crimson Line strongly suggests IT departments start gearing themselves up for when the data centers do open. You can do this by ensuring you have a capable team in place to handle your company’s migration to the cloud. As experts in cloud migration, we’ve already done so by ensuring we have Microsoft gold and silver competencies in:

  • Cloud Solutions;
  • Productivity;
  • Platform; and
  • Datacenter.

Your team can benefit from our experience, which we’ll happily share, by contacting us sooner rather than later. Crimson Line focusses on clients in the professional services and retail industries. We’re experienced in migrations for regional and national clients.

One big takeaway from Microsoft Inspire was that people achieve more through collaboration. Having worked closely with company’s IT teams who have benefitted greatly from our expertise, while they still remain the point of contact, we agree whole-heartedly with Microsoft.