Microsoft officially becomes first major cloud provider in Africa

Say goodbye to those annoying internet lag times, South Africa.

Microsoft has officially become the first major cloud service provider to open data centers in Africa. The company announced on Wednesday that two of its Azure cloud data centers have gone live in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.

“The launch of these regions marks a major milestone for Microsoft as we open our first enterprise-grade datacenters in Africa, becoming the first global provider to deliver cloud services from datacenters on the continent,” wrote Microsoft Azure VP Tom Keane in the statement.

The Redmond, Washington based company beat out fellow tech giants, like Amazon, which are also racing to open cloud data centers on the continent. The ecommerge giant previously announced it would have its AWS data centers running in South Africa by 2020. Read more...