Pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom has delivered the first Microsoft ExpressRoute service peering in Africa – offering customers better performance, tighter security and lower latency.
Microsoft ExpressRoute, part of Liquid Telecom’s CloudConnect offering, allows businesses to establish private connections to Azure. Previously, customers could only access ExpressRoute via peering locations in Europe.
Liquid Telecom recently deployed an ExpressRoute link for the Western Cape Government, which is overseeing a major upgrade to communications infrastructure in the region – marking it as the first customer with a direct private connection to the Azure Cloud that is exchanged locally in Africa.
The Western Cape Government states: “Liquid Telecom’s CloudConnect service has significantly increased the performance of our cloud services and will support the rollout of leading-edge cloud solutions to more of the region.”
Liquid Telecom is the only Microsoft partner to be providing an ExpressRoute service across eight African countries on its own fibre, including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
“Our advanced ExpressRoute offering is another important step forward for Africa’s Cloud. Liquid Telecom’s CloudConnect service is strongly positioned to be the highway that links businesses to a whole host of leading local and global cloud services,” says David Behr, group chief product officer at Liquid Telecom.
Liquid Telecom will also be able to offer ExpressRoute directly to the Azure Cloud in Africa when it goes live in data centres in South Africa later this year.
For businesses in Africa, this will mean:
* Liquid Telecom can guarantee the performance of the link end-to-end in a Service Level Agreement by routing all traffic within Africa.
* It will translate into significantly reduced latency – due to the closer proximity of the data centres compared to the European-based facilities.
* All data residing in the South African Azure data centres will be POPI compliant