Microsoft Expands its Azure Availability Zones in South Africa
Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it has expanded its Azure Availability Zones, making them generally available in the Johannesburg data centre region (SA North) of South Africa.
Azure Availability Zones form an important building block of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by ensuring resiliency and availability of business-critical applications and data through modernised architecture with built-in, end-to-end security.
What are Azure Availability Zones?
Essentially, Azure Availability Zones serve as an additional way for organisations in South Africa to guarantee uptime and continuous access to critical data, applications, and workloads.
They significantly reduce the risk of impacting events such as infrastructure disruptions, as well as improve recovery time and recovery points – to when data was last backed up.
These Azure Availability Zones build on the capabilities and benefits offered through Microsoft’s enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, which were launched in 2019.
“The expansion of cloud infrastructure in South Africa will further build the capability of South African organisations of all sizes and support the implementation and migration of their businesses to the cloud. It will also help them maintain data residency and meet compliance and regulatory requirements,” says Johannes Kanis, Cloud and Enterprise Business Group Lead at Microsoft South Africa.
According to a statement from the company, a number of South African businesses have been working with Microsoft pre-launch, and are already reaping the benefits of Azure Availability Zones: allowing them to create architectures for modern cloud applications and workloads that aid in reducing downtime and costs, and streamlining operational efficiencies.
“This investment in local infrastructure, and continuously expanding and improving the services we provide to our customers, will accelerate digital innovation in the country by enabling businesses to become more agile and competitive. This, in turn, will help unlock economic growth for the country more broadly,” concludes Kanis.
