Johannesburg, South Africa – 12 October 2021: Microsoft has now made Azure Availability Zones generally available in the Johannesburg data centre region (SA North). This move reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to investing in South Africa and enabling businesses in the country to be more competitive by providing support for business continuity and disaster recovery.
Azure Availability Zones form an important building block of a 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.
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 availability of cloud services through these data centre regions empower businesses on their journey towards digital transformation, and supports them as they reimagine their businesses to adapt to the rapid pace of change in today’s world.
“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.
A number of South African businesses have been working with Microsoft prior to general availability, and are already reaping the benefits of Azure Availability Zones: allowing them to create highly resilient, highly available architectures for modern cloud applications and workloads is driving their businesses forward by 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,” says Kanis.
