By Pearl Ngwama
Hinged on the fact that infrastructure expansion accelerates digital transformation and facilitates a connected African continent, technology giant Microsoft through its Africa Transformation Office (ATO) is working with Liquid Cloud to enable businesses with cloud services across Africa.
Liquid Cloud will work together with Microsoft to deliver resilient cloud solutions using its colocation and connectivity capabilities alongside Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (hyper converged infrastructure) and Azure Arc technology.
According to Microsoft, the result enables customers in markets such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe to meet regulatory and data residency requirements, address low latency workloads, strengthen resilience, and enable business continuity.
It added that it would expand access to Azure across Africa saying that the hybrid cloud environment extends Azure capabilities enabling customers to create cloud-native applications faster with Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) and data services such as App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, Azure SQL Managed Instance, PostgreSQL database, and Azure machine learning.
As a result, customers will be able to innovate anywhere and use the Azure platform to bring new solutions to life – to solve today’s challenges and create the future.
CEO of Liquid Cloud and Cyber Security, David Behr, said: “We witnessed an accelerated adoption of cloud technologies in Africa, and businesses are now reaping the benefits of their investment. Our customers are increasingly moving to a hybrid work culture, meaning the demand for cloud-based services will only grow.
“Our partnership will enable us to build comprehensive and edge-based cloud capabilities that meet customer regulatory requirements and ensure that they deliver value to their customers.”
General Manager Africa Regional Cluster of Microsoft, Wael Elkabbany, on his part said: “Critical infrastructure enablers are needed to provide access to the cloud to accelerate digital transformation and the adoption of digital technologies.
“Working with Liquid Cloud, access to the local cloud will be available to more organizations and highly regulated industries across the continent. In addition, hybrid cloud provides in-country resources that address data-residency, latency, and storage requirements.”
