Dear Listers, South Africa has always been ahead of Kenya in using their own/local firms/talent to build/customize applications to run their organizations. No surprise their concerns for data residency have been noted. *http://www.silicon.co.uk/cloud/datacenter/microsoft-data-centres-south-afric... <http://www.silicon.co.uk/cloud/datacenter/microsoft-data-centres-south-africa-212425>* *Colocation Offering* Microsoft’s decision to build two data centres in South Africa is notable considering that none of the world’s top-tier cloud providers currently have data centres in Africa. But it should be noted that Microsoft is apparently not actually building its own data centres from scratch in South Africa, but rather they will be collocated at existing facilities. Microsoft has so far not disclosed who its collocation partner in South Africa will be. *http://windowsitpro.com/azure/microsoft-expands-azure-global-footprint-two-n... <http://windowsitpro.com/azure/microsoft-expands-azure-global-footprint-two-new-datacenters-planned-africa>* Today Microsoft looks to beat their cloud competitors Amazon and Google to the South African continent with the announcement of two new Azure datacenters which will come online there in 2018. The two datacenters, located in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will provide a range of cloud services from Microsoft such as Azure, Office 365 <http://winsupersite.com/office-365>, and Dynamics 365. The facilities will also provide enterprise-grade reliability and performance plus the option to have data only reside on these two datacenters in order to to comply with various privacy and data protection laws. Once these datacenters are up and running in 2018 that will push Microsoft to a total of 40 global datacenters for their cloud based services. Bringing these datacenters online in South Africa means companies no longer have to go *off-continent* for their cloud delivered products and services: *"Currently many companies in Africa rely on cloud services delivered from outside of the continent. Microsoft’s new investment will provide highly available, scalable, and secure cloud services across Africa with the option of data residency in South Africa. With the introduction of these new cloud regions, Microsoft has now announced 40 regions around the world – more than any major cloud provider. The combination of Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure with the new regions in Africa will connect businesses with opportunity across the globe, help accelerate new investments, and improve access to cloud and internet services for people and organizations from Cairo to Cape Town."* You can read more about today's announcement on the Official Microsoft blog <https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/05/18/microsoft-deliver-microsoft-cloud-datacenters-africa/> or the MEA News Center <https://news.microsoft.com/en-xm/2017/05/18/microsoft-deliver-microsoft-cloud-datacenters-africa-enable-greater-innovation-entrepreneurship-economic-growth/#sm.000010vo5kesgevgrzk2b6qa4dx31> .