Leading Pan-African Internet and connectivity service provider, SEACOM has announced a partnership with Microsoft to enable Kenyan firms to link to the Microsft data centers in South Africa.
The private connection dubbed Azure Expressroute will link companies to the data centers without going through the public internet, reducing the risk of security breaches.
“The Seacom subsea cable, which connects Kenya to South Africa, offers a fibre express route that carries Terabytes of capacity with speeds offered to business customers from as low as 50MBps up to 10Gbps,” Seacom’s managing director Tony Tugee said.
“In addition to this, Seacom’s recent acquisition of Fiberco’s network allows it to extend this capability across South Africa and into the major data centers where the cloud providers, such as Microsoft, have a presence.”
We are proud to announce that we will now offer direct connections from our East African network to public cloud networks and data centres located in South Africa. This follows the launch of Microsoft’s Data Centers in South Africa based in Capetown and Johannesburg. pic.twitter.com/UuKaLK2l10
— SEACOM (@SEACOM) April 2, 2019
“At Microsoft, we believe that Africa is the next frontier. We, therefore, launched the first Data Centers in the continent hosted in South Africa. This demonstrates our commitment to growing the African continent,” Sebuh Haileleul Microsoft Country Manager.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks. It was announced in October 2008, and released on February 1, 2010, as “Windows Azure” before being renamed “Microsoft Azure” on March 25, 2014.
In 2016 Seacom focused on companies that aimed to deploy services on the cloud. This led to the introduction of Azure ExpressRoute and the offer to Seacom customers to extend their on-premise networks into the cloud in collaboration with Microsoft.
