Amazon's Cape Town region will enable more African organisations to use advanced technologies.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced last week that it will open an infrastructure region in Cape Town in the first half of 2020, which will add an additional three Availability Zones to the 55 Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide.
An additional 12 Availability Zones are expected to come online in the coming months in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden and the US.
An AWS Region is a physical location in the world in where AWS has multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
AWS has already been active in South Africa, having launched a development centre in Cape Town, created local teams to help customers move to the cloud, developed an AWS office in Johannesburg, brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect and launched infrastructure points of presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg, which adds to the 138 points of presence globally.
The Cape Town region will provide lower latency to end users across sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organisations to make use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, mobile services and more to drive innovation.
It will also enable local AWS customers to store their data in South Africa without worrying about whether their content will be moved without consent. Those who want to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act will have access to secure infrastructure that meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.
The CEO of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy said that, having built the original version of Amazon EC2 in their Cape Town development center 14 years ago, and with thousands of African companies using AWS for years, they’ve been able to witness first-hand the technical talent and potential in Africa.
“Technology has the opportunity to transform lives and economies across Africa and we’re excited about AWS and the cloud being a meaningful part of that transformation.”
