1. Faster time to market<\/strong><\/p>\n Companies can easily and quickly spin up apps and systems for testing new ideas or designs and retire them if they don’t deliver the required outcome.<\/p>\n 2. Scalability and flexibility<\/strong><\/p>\n Businesses can scale their computing power and storage as needed without investing in new physical architecture.<\/p>\n 3. Cost savings<\/strong><\/p>\n You only pay for the resources you use, avoiding the risk of costly overbuilds or overprovisioning in your own data centre space.<\/p>\n 4. Better collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n Your data is accessible from basically anywhere on the globe, at least where the Internet is available. This allows people to work or collaborate from wherever they may be.<\/p>\n 5. Advanced security<\/strong><\/p>\n Reputed cloud services offer a range of security features, automatic maintenance, and centralised management. Top-notch providers also employ security experts to ensure their protection remains up to date.<\/p>\n 6. Data loss prevention<\/strong><\/p>\n Backup and disaster recovery features ensure that your business can restore systems and data in the event of a system failure or cyberattack.<\/p>\n It is technically possible to use a cloud service without a local presence, but providers with data centre infrastructure on home ground will offer better performance due to lower latency.<\/p>\n Businesses should also be aware of certain provisions in South Africa’s Protection of Private Information Act (POPIA) that govern the transfer of South Africans’ personal data outside of the country,<\/p>\n Section 72 of the act prevents the transfer of any personal information of data subjects to third parties outside of South Africa without certain protections in place.<\/p>\n Although these measures can be complex to navigate, reputable cloud services must ensure that they comply with the laws of the country where they have a presence.<\/p>\n Therefore, using a service with a local presence could prevent your business avoid violating data-sharing laws when handling customer or staff details online.<\/p>\n Below are five of the biggest cloud service providers in South Africa, which either have a local presence or plan to launch a South African region soon.<\/p>\n AWS launched its first African region in Cape Town in April 2020<\/strong><\/a>. The location offers three clusters of data centres \u2014 also known as availability zones.<\/p>\n The world’s biggest cloud service provider has deep roots in South Africa, stretching back to 2004 when it set up a development centre in Cape Town.<\/p>\n Under the stewardship of software engineer Chris Pinkham and lead developer Christopher Brown, the team created Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) \u2014 the very first AWS cloud service.<\/p>\n Editorial credit: Kristi Blokhin \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n Most Internet users will have accessed a service running on GCP in the past few years, given that it currently powers popular applications like Google Search, YouTube, Google Drive, and YouTube.<\/p>\n In October 2022, Google announced that it would add a South African region to GCP, its first location in Africa.<\/p>\n The region will be hosted in Johannesburg and feature three zones. Its exact launch date remains to be confirmed.<\/p>\n Editorial credit: Tada Images \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n Huawei Cloud offers three availability zones out of its own data centres in Johannesburg, which first came into operation in March 2019<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n The company says this facility complies with Tier 3+ standards. It uses Huawei’s own high-performance chips and network devices.<\/p>\n Editorial credit: Madrolly \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n Oracle rolled out<\/strong><\/a> its Johannesburg region in January 2022, one of eight new locations that form part of an aggressive rollout strategy.<\/p>\n At the time, Oracle EMEA executive vice president Richard Smith said the new region offered a “next-generation” cloud to run any application faster and more securely for less.<\/p>\n Oracle Cloud Infrastructure lets customers migrate IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or build cloud-native applications.<\/p>\n Editorial credit: josefkubes \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n Microsoft opened its first South Africa-based enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in March 2019.<\/p>\n It added three availability zones for Azure at its Johannesburg facility in October 2021<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Azure underpins all of Microsoft’s cloud-based services, including its popular Microsoft 365 productivity suite.<\/p>\n Cloud computing can give your business the edge in an era where agility, flexibility, and efficiency are key.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":478647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[27543,727,35258,33897,35,54531,24957,75628],"class_list":["post-478561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-hosting","tag-amazon-web-services-aws","tag-cloud-computing","tag-cloud-services","tag-google-cloud","tag-headline","tag-huawei-cloud","tag-microsoft-azure","tag-oracle-cloud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478783,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478561\/revisions\/478783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cloud services with local presence<\/h2>\n
\nAmazon Web Services (AWS)<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/AWS-painting-on-wall_new-.jpg\")
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\nGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Google-Cloud-sign-in-front-of-office_headline.jpg\")
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\nHuawei Cloud<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Huawei-billboard-logo_headline.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>
\nOracle Cloud<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Oracle-Cloud-new.jpg\")
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\nMicrosoft Azure<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Microsoft-Azure-on-laptop-new-logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nNow read: Africa’s largest data-centre company gets R11.8 billion loan for expansions and solar power<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"