Microsoft ExpressRoute partner Seacom offers Azure connectivity

Pan-African telecom enabler, Seacom announced, it is now a Microsoft ExpressRoute partner, meaning that it can offer its business customers affordable, dedicated Ethernet links between their own IT infrastructures and Microsoft’s Azure and Office365 datacentres around the world.

This will help African organisations that are migrating some or all of their business applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud, to benefit from faster and more reliable connectivity with Microsoft’s Azure platform. Azure, with more than 120,000 new customers joining per month, is one of the world’s most secure, trusted and flexible enterprise-grade cloud computing platforms.

ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet. They offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical public Internet connections. Since Microsoft does not yet have Azure datacentres in Africa, a dedicated, high-quality connection to Azure services hosted in Europe or other parts of the world can ensure a smoother, faster experience for the end-user.

In conjunction with the launch of its Express Route partnership Seacom is offering promotional pricing on two of the connectivity offerings for the next 6 months.

Seacom owns and operates Africa’s most-advanced and largest IP, MPLS fibre backbone, interconnecting Africa with rest of the world. The company has recently been expanding metro networks in major business centres to connect business customers directly onto its high-speed international fibre backbone, offering quality connectivity and guaranteed network latencies.

Says Robert Marston, ‎Global Head of Product at Seacom: “By offering our customer dedicated links to the Azure infrastructure, we will help them enjoy high throughput and fast latencies so they can benefit from the scale and economics of the public cloud without having to compromise on network performance. Because we can control the infrastructure from the last kilometre of the fibre to our many points of presence in the world’s largest Internet traffic exchange points, we can ensure our clients use Azure as naturally as if it was an extension of their own IT infrastructure.”