{"id":535817,"date":"2024-05-09T12:02:13","date_gmt":"2024-05-09T10:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=535817"},"modified":"2024-05-09T12:09:07","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T10:09:07","slug":"us-hyperscale-cloud-face-off-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cloud-hosting\/535817-us-hyperscale-cloud-face-off-in-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"US hyperscale cloud face-off in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four US tech giants offer cloud services with availability zones in South Africa for optimal performance, lower costs, and full local support.<\/p>\n

Businesses benefit from migrating their applications, online systems, and data to the cloud. Firstly, it can significantly decrease upfront capital expenditure on IT equipment.<\/p>\n

Businesses don’t need to install, run, and secure their own physical servers and data centre infrastructure, and they can significantly downsize their local equipment.<\/p>\n

Consequently, IT teams have less maintenance to perform and can focus more on optimising the hardware and software used locally.<\/p>\n

In addition, reliable cloud computing services have significant data and service redundancy in place, with dispersed infrastructure that can step in if there are issues at the first location.<\/p>\n

Finally, cloud computing allows a business to scale its computing resources quickly up or down as required.<\/p>\n

Below are more details about the history of local operations, features, and major customers of the four hypescale US cloud companies operating in South Africa.<\/p>\n

\n

Amazon Web Services (AWS)<\/h2>\n

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the oldest and biggest US cloud services provider in the world.<\/p>\n

AWS has been in South Africa for over two decades, with a Capetonian team developing one of its key components \u2014 Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) \u2014\u00a0 in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

AWS started building its business client base in South Africa in 2004, but its first local region only went live in Cape Town in April 2020<\/strong><\/a>. At the time, it was Amazon’s 23rd region in the world.<\/p>\n

This region supports three availability zones that can run several instances and support dozens<\/strong> <\/a>of AWS services.<\/p>\n

As explained by Coursera<\/strong><\/a>, AWS boasts computer resources and services for constructing apps quickly with pay-as-you-use prices at per-second rate.<\/p>\n

Users are able to rent a configurable server on AWS, which they can run just like a physical on-site server.<\/p>\n

Among AWS’s most noteworthy customers in South Africa are Absa, Flutterwave, Jumo, Mix Telematics, TymeBank, and Wesbank.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

Google Cloud<\/h2>\n

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the latest US cloud services provider to launch a local region in South Africa, with its first location in Johannesburg going live in January 2024<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Google Cloud was originally called App Engine when it launched in 2008.<\/p>\n

Google Cloud provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. It charges customers on a per-minute basis.<\/p>\n

According to Coursera, GCP is mainly used to develop and maintain original applications that can be published from Google’s hyper-scale data centres.<\/p>\n

Google Cloud’s customers in South Africa include Africa Digital Group, Deloitte Africa, FNB, Healthbridge, Liquid C2, and MTN.<\/p>\n

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Editorial credit: Tada Images \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Microsoft Azure<\/h2>\n

Microsoft Azure is AWS’s biggest rival on the global stage.<\/p>\n

It rolled out its first local enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in March 2019.<\/p>\n

Three Azure availability zones were launched at the Johannesburg region (South Africa North) in October 2021.<\/p>\n

Microsoft also made its Dynamics 365 and Power Platform generally available in its South African data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.<\/p>\n

Azure provides public cloud services charged on a per-minute basis, with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions being key offerings.<\/p>\n

These are most often used for analytics, virtual computing, storage, and networking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

Oracle<\/h2>\n

The Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region went live in January 2022, becoming the company’s 37th region.<\/p>\n

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers easy migration of IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or building new cloud-native applications.<\/p>\n

The company also offers a wide range of application modernisation and cloud strategies to help African organisations operate with global competitiveness.<\/p>\n

Oracle’s major customers in South Africa include Accenture Africa, Airports Company South Africa, the International Data Corporation, and Telkom.<\/p>\n

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Editorial credit: josefkubes \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four US tech giants offer cloud services with availability zones in South Africa for optimal performance, lower costs, and full local support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":487503,"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":[27543,35258,22807,33897,35,24957,3372],"class_list":["post-535817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-hosting","tag-amazon-web-services-aws","tag-cloud-services","tag-data-centres","tag-google-cloud","tag-headline","tag-microsoft-azure","tag-oracle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535817"}],"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=535817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535971,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535817\/revisions\/535971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}