Vodacom Business receives AWS Outposts Ready designation as the first AWS partner in Africa

To assist these businesses with their hybrid cloud experience, Vodacom Business has achieved the status of the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner in Africa, to attain the AWS Outposts Ready designation.

This means our business clients, both small and large enterprises, can benefit from a deep heritage in the provision of datacenter managed services from both Vodacom and AWS, by having the choice to adopt cloud flexibly and at their own speed. From private cloud on-premise or in the Vodacom datacenter, public cloud on AWS’s local availability zones or a combination of private and public when they deploy in a hybrid manner.

“Businesses want a trusted hybrid cloud services partner to ensure that they will benefit from the migration to hybrid cloud, including agility, flexibility, cost control and dynamic optimisation. As the first AWS Outposts Ready designation in Africa, we are able to assure all our clients that they are in the right hands when it comes to a seamless solution in deploying AWS services. This enables businesses to truly benefit from a consistent hybrid cloud experience.”

Kabelo Makwane, Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting and Security for Vodacom Business

This achievement recognises that Vodacom Business, with over 20 years in Tier certified DC (datacenter) managed services, has demonstrated proven relevant domain experience and undergone business and technical enablement to successfully integrate AWS Outposts Ready deployments. The designation forms part of the AWS Service Ready programme, which validates Vodacom Business as an accredited AWS Amazon Partner Network (APN) partner in offering sound architecture and adherence to AWS best practices and market adoption.

AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure, application programming interfaces (APIs), products and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space or on-premises facility. This is ideal for organisations that require latency sensitive applications, as AWS Outposts can help businesses run applications where they need them to be located. AWS Outposts also allows data to be processed locally, while keeping data lakes and ML training cloud services in a region, which means moving data to the cloud for long-term archival is easier. In addition, with AWS Outposts the location of where workloads run and where the data resides can be controlled, while using local operational tooling for monitoring and stability.

For some businesses there are legacy applications that are difficult to move from on-premises to the public cloud due to latency-sensitive system interdependencies between the various components. AWS Outposts allows these latency-sensitive interdependencies to be modernised on premise, and then easily accelerates the migration of the applications to the public cloud when they are ready.

“Cloud computing has become even more integral to business operations in the past year, as companies have had to adjust to remote working conditions while needing to be agile, cost-effective, resource-efficient and innovative with technology. Through our continued partnership with AWS, a leading provider of hybrid cloud solutions, we can support businesses in accelerating their cloud strategies to be more resilient in this uncertain future.”

Kabelo Makwane, Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting and Security for Vodacom Business