The reality of historically low economic growth in Africa is precisely why the world mistakenly believes that Africa is lagging too far behind the global cloud innovation boom. This way of thinking is fundamentally wrong.
According to Business Daily Africa, as of 2021, our continent accounted for just $1.2 billion of the global public cloud market; it has more than doubled in the last three years and continues to grow exponentially year on year.
- Liquid Cloud has been approved by Amazon Web Service (AWS) as a Direct Connect Delivery Partner.
- Liquid Cloud’s secured certification makes it one of only four partners in Africa to earn this achievement after undergoing an extensive and rigorous technical and business review by AWS.
- A month ago, Liquid Cloud announced it would offer connectivity to Oracle Cloud via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect in South Africa within the Oracle Cloud Region Johannesburg.
- In July, Liquid also opened its first Cyber Security Fusion Center in Johannesburg.
Liquid Cloud, a pan-African technology group, announced that it has been approved by Amazon Web Service (AWS) as a Direct Connect Delivery Partner. After passing a thorough and demanding technical and business assessment by AWS, Liquid Cloud, a division of Cassava Technologies, was awarded this prestigious accreditation, making it one of only four partners in Africa to do so.
Cassava Technologies was founded by African entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa. The Group’s Executive Chairman, Masiyiwa, also serves on several international boards, including Unilever Plc, Netflix, Bank of America’s Global Advisory Board, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and is also a long-time board member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Museum .
Existing and prospective AWS users can directly access their Direct Connect services, which are accessible to customers in all countries where Liquid operates. Additionally, through this partnership, they can now reduce administrative burden by managing the end-to-end process and undifferentiated tasks on behalf of clients.
The cloud offers companies, especially young and growth-ready companies, a path that can be scaled at any time. With latency being such a common problem in Africa, serving a customer as quickly as possible is key to gaining the competitive advantage that is a matter of life and death in a start-up landscape.
According to the company’s website, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Amazon subsidiary that offers on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, businesses, and governments. These cloud computing web services provide distributed computing power and software tools across AWS server farms. One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have a virtual computer cluster at their disposal over the Internet at any time. AWS virtual machines emulate most attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM storage; hard drive/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; Networking; and pre-installed application software such as web servers, databases and customer relationship management (CRM).
“Liquid has over 100,000km of fiber coverage across the continent, and we leverage our fiber infrastructure to provide customers with a direct connection to the AWS cloud without intermediaries. This relationship with AWS marks an important step in our strategy to support our enterprise customers’ needs in many of our African markets,” said Winston Ritson, Chief Operating Officer, Liquid Cloud and Cyber Security.
This partnership will bring significant benefits to Liquid Cloud’s multinational and large enterprise customers. AWS Direct Connect allows customers to connect to the AWS cloud over a dedicated connection, bypassing the public internet. In addition to having access to a range of services, including Microsoft and Oracle, Liquid Cloud customers will experience more consistent, reliable, and stable performance.
“With Liquid Cloud, our customers will have access to world-class offerings from a service provider with deep experience in delivering seamless cloud services to African businesses of all sizes,” said Ritson.
Liquid Cloud strives to partner with companies and support them in every step of their digital transformation. “We continually invest to ensure local businesses have access to the highest standards of technology that provide their customers with a seamless experience and compete with businesses in other developed economies. Africa is ripe for international investment and cloud technologies are a critical element in ensuring success,” he said.
Meanwhile, just a month ago, Liquid Cloud announced that it would offer connectivity to Oracle Cloud via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect in South Africa within the Oracle Cloud Johannesburg region.
Partnering with Oracle, Liquid Cloud customers have access to Oracle Cloud via FastConnect and Liquid’s large fiber network.
FastConnect is offered at current Africa Data Center (ADC) facilities across the continent for Liquid Cloud’s co-located customers, in addition to organizations using Liquid CloudConnect as a service. A company’s on-premises applications and Oracle Cloud Fusion applications are connected through this solution, improving the user experience. With FastConnect, companies can move huge amounts of data securely, economically and effectively via Liquid CloudConnect.
Whether on-premises or jointly with ADC facilities across the continent, Liquid will help its customers achieve simplicity, enterprise-class security and seamless operations.
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In July, Liquid also opened its first Cyber Security Fusion Center in Johannesburg to eliminate silos and increase threat visibility, leading to closer collaboration between teams and increased cyber resilience.
The adoption of digital technologies has accelerated rapidly around the world, and Africa is no different. However, the nature of work and the way organizations work is constantly evolving, as is the scale of cyber threats.
It also brings together existing Liquid Cloud Operations and Liquid Network Operation Centers to ensure customers have full cybersecurity, cloud and network support for end-to-end security.
The Fusion Centre, one of six planned across Africa, will provide 24/7 managed cybersecurity detection and response services to mitigate the growing threat of cyberattacks on governments and businesses of all sizes.
Expanded by partner advisory cybersecurity services providers ITC Secure, Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Xcitium, Liquid Cyber Security’s new center will provide threat intelligence and help protect African businesses from rampant and rising cybercrime.
“Our pan-African cybersecurity fusion centers, when fully operational, will leverage our ability to track and predict threats across the continent and will be augmented by the capabilities of our international partners such as Microsoft, ITC Secure and Xcitium,” says Liquid Cloud and Cybersecurity CEO David Behr.
