If you wanted a demonstration of how important cloud services have become in Africa, it was the unusual occurrence of high-level executives from both Amazon and Microsoft, the world’s biggest providers, being in South Africa at the same time this month.
Yousef Khalidi, Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of Azure Networking,
Story from Quartz. Story by By Toby Shapshak.
“It was sheer coincidence,” says Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of researchers World Wide Worx, “but the presence of the bosses of the two biggest cloud computing platforms in the world made South Africa seem like an eligible single being wooed by highly desirable suitors”.
And it’s not just the big American companies, Huawei, China’s giant telecoms company, is also building out data center in South Africa and announced it had begun offering commercial cloud services this month. It’s easy to see why. South Africa is the continent’s most developed economy, has advanced internet infrastructure and often hosts the African head office for many global technology and internet firms.
Read more at Quartz.