Amazon Web Services:
African data centres

Currently, AWS provides 57 availability zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide. In October 2019, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it would be opening data centres in South Africa in the first half of 2020.

Addition of an AWS Region in Cape Town will enable organisations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa. According to AWS CEO Andy Jassy, this will also enable more African organisations to drive innovation by leveraging advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile services. Andy Jassy expects the company to launch more infrastructure regions in Africa once the planned Cape Town region facility has gone live.

"We see an opportunity to help African countries, companies and builders have the same access to technology in a cost-effective way, but also capabilities allowing them to build all kinds of new businesses, as well as services governments can use to service citizens better. That is very much the motivation for us in building regions in Africa and the Middle East," said Jassy.

Furthermore, local AWS customers will be able to store their data in South Africa in the knowledge that this will not be moved without their consent. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, explains: “Those looking to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) will have access to secure infrastructure that meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.”

“AWS has been an active member of the local technology community since 2004, when we opened the Amazon Development Center in Cape Town. That's where we built many pioneering networking technologies, our next-generation software for customer support, and the technology behind our compute service, Amazon EC2.” In 2015, AMS opened an AWS office in Johannesburg and in 2017, they brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa, through AWS Direct Connect.”

aws.amazon.com