Microsoft has announced the general availability of Office 365 services from its new cloud datacenters in South Africa. The expanded availability is part of its ongoing efforts to bring the services to more people. This launch comes after the company launched its first datacenters in Cape Town and Johannesburg back in March.
Having Office delivered from its new datacenters brings Office 365 features and compliance to more people, especially for customers in countries with local data residency policies. This helps companies comply with regulations for those countries, which is especially important in fields such as healthcare and financial services. Data residency is an important part of keeping customer data secure, and the new data centers allow core data to be stored only in the South Africa datacenter.
Office 365 services join Azure in being available from the new cloud datacenters in the region, and Microsoft is planning to bring more of its cloud services to Africa. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform should be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
Microsoft has been investing more and more in the African continent, and in addition to having new datacenters powering its cloud services, the company recently opened the first Africa Development Center in Kenya and Nigeria. The ADC will gather talent from all over the continent and be a "premier center of engineering for Microsoft".