Office 365 now available from South Africa data centers

Earlier this year, Microsoft made some significant headway in bringing its Azure cloud solutions to regions in South Africa.

In March, Cape Town and Johannesburg became two South African locations newly imbued with Azure datacenters and the potential to host 112,000 new jobs over the next fours year, in large part due to that investment.

Just a mere five months later, Microsoft is already leveraging its presence in South Africa to provide another one of its cloud-based services in Office 365.

Office 365, delivered from local datacenters in South Africa, helps our customers enable the modern workplace and empower their employees with real-time collaboration and cloud-powered intelligence while maintaining security, compliance, and in-country customer data residency. The addition of South Africa as a new geography for Office 365 increases the options for secure, cloud productivity services combined with customer data residency in 16 geographies across the globe along with three additional geographies also announced.

To comply with regulatory requirements and avoid another lengthy court proceeding such as the Microsoft-Ireland case, the company plans to keep core customer data “store only in their data center geography (Geo)- in this case, the cloud datacenters within South Africa.”

Microsoft has also invested in its first African Development Center (ADC) in both Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria. The ADC is tasked with being the hotbed of world-class African talent creating solutions on a local and global scale.