Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a partnership with Orange Middle East & Africa (OMEA) to deliver AWS Wavelength to Morocco and Senegal as part of a strategic strategy to increase its cloud footprint in Africa.
Jan Hofmeyr, Vice President of EC2 Edge at AWS, while confirming the partnership in a statement highlighted the transformative potential of the collaboration.
With the announcement, AWS services will be made available for the first time in countries without physical AWS infrastructure, such as data centres. Rather, Orange’s data centres will host the services, allowing for local data processing and storage.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types like gp2 will be supported by the new Wavelength Zones, according to the release.
Additionally, to support a wide range of workloads, users can use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon EMR, and Application Load Balancer (ALB).
“Customers of all sizes and all industries in Morocco and Senegal will be able to access local AWS compute and storage for data residency, low latency, and security needs for applications across real-time gaming and regulated industries, helping customers unlock new innovation and accelerate digital transformation,” Hofmeyr explained.
Despite being the biggest participant in the $270 billion worldwide cloud infrastructure industry, Amazon is not very well-known in Africa, where it only operates in a few nations, including South Africa.
Commenting on the partnership, Orange Middle East and Africa CEO, Jérôme Hénique, said: “The announcement of AWS Wavelength Zones for North & West Africa is a major achievement in our strategy to foster the cloud transformation of African businesses.”
According to data portal Statista, which was cited by Reuters, the cloud market is predicted to increase at a rate of 15% per year and reach $18 billion by 2028. Businesses in the telecoms, finance, healthcare, and public sectors that wish to keep their data local can benefit from the AWS infrastructure.
We earlier announced that Amazon has announced plans to increase its cloud computing infrastructure in Germany with a €7.8 billion ($8.44 billion) investment by 2040.
