Teraco selected as Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connectivity partner

Teraco Data Environments, Africa's largest neutral data centre, today announced it will be a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connectivity partner, providing clients with high performance private network connections to Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft Cloud Services.

Teraco will be one of the first companies to offer access to the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute sites in Africa, when Azure becomes generally available in 2018. Clients will be able to connect directly to Azure ExpressRoute via the Teraco Cloud Exchange in both Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Reliable and predictable network performance are essential ingredients for the successful implementation of a hybrid cloud strategy, as applications are expected to seamlessly operate between private and public cloud environments.

Research from IDG Connect has shown that while organisations want to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and cost savings of the public cloud, they are uneasy about migrating further workloads due to concerns around connectivity, security and application performance. Significantly, respondents stated they would move 69% more workloads to the cloud if connectivity and security issues were resolved.

Through the addition of Azure ExpressRoute, via the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform, enterprises and service providers can now establish predictable, high performance, SLA-based connections to Azure, making Teraco's facilities the ideal location to build hybrid cloud solutions.

Lex van Wyk, CEO, Teraco, says the increasing trend towards hybrid cloud has driven a need for a secure connection between public cloud providers and physical data centres: "Teraco is focused on ensuring customers meet their IT and application performance requirements. Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute is a great addition to the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform and meets the significant demands of our colocated enterprise and service provider customers, who are building hybrid solutions based on Microsoft Cloud Technologies."

"Our collaboration with Teraco provides customers with new options to benefit from the efficiencies of hybrid cloud," said Ross Ortega, Microsoft Azure, Networking Product Management. "Teraco is an established data centre provider in Africa, providing the opportunity to bring the benefits of Microsoft Cloud Services to more partners and customers."

Teraco's Cloud Exchange is an infrastructure platform, located in Teraco's colocation centres, allowing customers to build and manage private, SLA-based connections to multiple clouds over a single physical connection.

Teraco's Van Wyk says that in effect, Azure ExpressRoute provides clients with choice, and as a neutral data centre, this flexibility is key to Teraco's offering: "We have invested in Teraco's exchange to enable immediate activation of secure connections from our clients to Azure ExpressRoute." He says the value of Azure ExpressRoute will also be seen in the different types of connections clients require: "Clients can peer via NAPAfrica or connect via Teraco Cloud Exchange within the data centres depending on their business models."

Teraco, as one of the first African partners to offer colocation connectivity to Azure ExpressRoute, anticipates seeing an uptake of connections of its Johannesburg and Cape Town-based data centres, where clients have a substantial amount of footprint, and Azure ExpressRoute.