AWS Direct Connect has been launched in South Africa, a first for the African continent. The move customers local access to redundant and diverse network infrastructure.
With AWS Direct Connect in the country, customers based in South Africa have dedicated, reliable, and high bandwidth connectivity to the Amazon Global Network, bypassing the public internet.
Customers can connect to all AWS infrastructure regions around the world (except China) from locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and their traffic will remain in the Amazon backbone network throughout the entire journey.
AWS already works with organisations of all sizes in South Africa, from the newest startups like Entersekt, NicheStreem, and Paygate to some of the most well-known household names like Pick ‘n Pay and TravelStart to move workloads to the cloud.
One of the main requests AWS has received from South African customers has been to help reduce costs and improve network performance from on-premises environments to AWS infrastructure regions located in Europe, the US and around the world.
AWS Direct Connect is a dedicated network connection that brings robust and secure connectivity between on-premises or colocation environments and the cloud. Enabling organizations to transfer data via a private connection, AWS Direct Connect is ideal for organisations with latency- or compliance-sensitive workloads.
The new AWS Direct Connect location in Johannesburg is located at the Teraco JB1 facility and in Cape Town at the Teraco CT1 facility. Customers with equipment in these facilities can use Direct Connect to optimise their connection to AWS.
If their equipment is located somewhere else, they can work with one of AWS’ APN Partners supporting Direct Connect or their carrier to establish a connection from their location to the Teraco AWS Direct Connection location nearest to them, and from there on to AWS.
Lex van Wyk, CEO of Teraco, says that direct connection to AWS is becoming a critical component as digital transformation drives renewed energy into virtualised, on-demand provider-based services.
“AWS Direct Connect is an exciting addition to Teraco. Clients looking to build hybrid solutions with their dedicated IT infrastructures now have choice. Teraco offers immediate activation of secure connections from our clients to AWS. The value of these cloud computing options will also be seen in the different types of connections clients require.”
He says that, within Teraco, clients can peer via NAPAfrica or connect via Teraco Cloud Exchange.
With cloud becoming an increasingly important part of the IT landscape, organisations need to manage both on premises and cloud applications, both in-house and outsourced. Choosing the right deployment methods for specific workloads is essentially creating new network architecture.
