Liquid Telecom has announced that it made Microsoft Azure available across its pan-African network.
Microsoft recently announced the launch of two new data centres in Africa offering azure. The new data centres are located in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. Azure is the first of Microsoft’s cloud services to be delivered from the new datacentres. Office 365 is anticipated to be available by the third quarter of calendar year 2019, while Dynamics 365 is anticipated in the fourth quarter.
With the availability of Microsoft’s Azure regions in South Africa and using local Microsoft Azure Stack deployments in Liquid Telecom’s African data centres connected via Microsoft ExpressRoute, customers are able to access a hybrid cloud solution residing within the African continent.
The Liquid Telecom ecosystem brings cloud services in Africa together, offering customers a one-stop solution for cloud computing, connectivity, and professional services through Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack. Liquid Telecom now provides this modern hybrid cloud services in five countries – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda – with more regions scheduled to go live later including the Middle East, North and West Africa.
Liquid Telecom currently offers the following cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure across Africa.
- Azure Identity & Access Management – which provides customers with the ability to synchronise their on-premise Active Directory to Azure Active Directory.
- Infrastructure Modernisation – which enables businesses to move on premises IT infrastructure to the cloud to meet corporate strategy and growth objectives.
- Database Modernisation – with End of Service dates announced for both SQL Server and Windows Server, now is the perfect time for customers with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to move to Azure.
- Modern Data Protection – which provides customers with the ability to backup data from both onsite and cloud-based services; eliminating the need for resource and time heavy methods such as Tape based backups.
- Cloud Expense Management – moving to the cloud requires careful management combined with detailed resource optimisation plans, such as scaling back resources when not needed.
Liquid Telecom is a communications solutions provider across 13 countries primarily in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa that serves mobile operators, carriers, enterprise, media and content companies and retail customers with high-speed, reliable connectivity, hosting and co-location and digital services. It has built Africa’s largest fibre network, approaching 70,000km, and operates data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Nairobi, with a combined potential 19,000 square metres of rack space and 80MW of power. This is in addition to offering leading cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office365, Microsoft Azure and innovative digital content provision including Netflix and Kwesé TV across their fibre footprint.