The imminent launch of Microsoft Azure data centres in South Africa will help dispel many of the fears still holding companies back from deploying the cloud for mission-critical applications, in turn creating a significant market opportunity for local resellers and systems integrators. He says the presence of local, hyper-scale Azure data centres will spur many local end-user organisations to start shifting key production systems to the cloud. Says Vieira: “Many South African organisations are using software-as-a-service offerings for email, office productivity tools, and other less mission-critical loads, often from local cloud service providers. “However, we are seeing some resistance to moving to the cloud and Azure among South African resellers,” Vieira says. “Resellers can already sell internationally hosted Azure solutions to their clients, but as the local data centres go live, the value proposition will be stronger than ever,” says Vieira.

Source: The North Africa Journal August 20, 2018 10:07 UTC