Amazon Web Services officially opens AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region

AWS Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection. It enables organisations of all sizes to experiment and innovate faster. With the new Region, local customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), will be able to store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it.

Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It is comprised of three Availability Zones, bringing the Global AWS Infrastructure to a total of 73 Availability Zones (AZ).

A Growing Presence in Africa

This new Region is a continuation of the AWS investment in Africa. In 2004, Amazon opened a Development Center in Cape Town that focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). AWS has also added a number of teams including account managers, customer service reps, partner managers, solutions architects, developer advocates, and more, helping customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.

In 2015, the company continued its expansion, opening an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017 brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect. In 2018 Amazon launched infrastructure on the African continent introducing Amazon CloudFront to South Africa, with two edge locations in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and recently in Nairobi, Kenya. They also support the growth of technology education with AWS Academy and AWS Educate, and continue to support the growth of new businesses through AWS Activate. The addition of the AWS Region in South Africa helps builders in organisations of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, as well as educational institutions, NGOs, and the public sector across Africa, to innovate and grow.