Africa’s Demand For Cloud Services Through On-Demand Connectivity

The buzz around cloud services in Africa has only being growing louder over the last year. The recent arrival of hyperscale cloud providers in Africa is expected to pave the way for widespread adoption of cloud-based services across the region.

So far, South Africa has largely been driving that adoption. Last year, Microsoft opened two Azure data centres in South Africa, while AWS opened its first AWS region there in April. According to research company IDC, annual cloud computing subscriptions in South Africa will grow from $370 million in 2019 to $1.7 billion in 2024. Yet as data centre construction increases in other parts of the region, countries such as Kenya and Nigeria are expected to play an important role in both driving and facilitating the demand for cloud-based services.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic is expected to only accelerate the trend towards cloud-based services in Africa. IDC has predicted that the pandemic will result in cloud spending rising across Middle East, Turkey and Africa to US$2.8 billion a year.

Lockdown measures across the region have reaffirmed the need for African businesses to embrace collaboration tools, cloud-based platforms and secure remote access. Likewise, the pandemic has placed a spotlight on the resiliency of the region’s digital infrastructure and the importance of disaster recovery practices.

IDC identifies sectors in Africa such as education, media and communications, government, healthcare and retail as needing to move fast to meet the new demands of its virtual workforce.

Console Connect in Africa

As demand for cloud-based services grows across Africa, only Console Connect’s Network as a Service (NaaS) platform is able to offer African businesses fast, flexible and secure access to major cloud providers worldwide.

Using Console Connect’s self-provisioning interconnection platform, global carrier and enterprise customers can instantly spin-up international services in real-time from over 350 data centres globally to key locations in Africa.

Users of the platform can interconnect between key data centres in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Djibouti, as well as spin-up direct and secure layer 2 services to global cloud, SaaS, and IX peering partners on the platform.

Earlier this year, we partnered with Teraco to make Console Connect available on its Africa Cloud Exchange (ACX). Through this partnership, enterprise and service provider customers can directly connect to the platform via any one of Teraco’s five South African data centres – giving them instant access to our growing ecosystem of cloud, SaaS, IX and IoT providers.

We’ve now extended that partnership to bring you access to Africa’s largest IX provider, NAPAfrica. By accessing NAPAfrica through Console Connect, users can peer locally in South Africa with enterprises, network operators, CDNs and cloud services providers. NAPAfrica’s internet exchange points (IXPs) offer direct access to over 430 unique networks (ASNs) servicing over 20 countries in the southern African region.