AWS Opens New Offices in Johannesburg, South Africa
AWS Opens New Offices in Johannesburg, South Africa. Amazon Web Services has announced that it has opened a new office in Johannesburg, South Africa. The company stated that this is due to the increasing demand of the company’s services in the region.
“Johannesburg offers an incredible talent pool of highly skilled and creative people. It is home to many notable South African enterprises leading the way in digital innovation as well as fast-growing startups,” Chris Erasmus, Country Manager at AWS told IT News Africa. In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services — now commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with a business.
“The new office will support customers to innovate, lower their IT costs, and grow their organisations by leveraging the cloud. We look forward to fostering the country’s pioneering spirit alongside our customers by helping them accelerate their digital transformation and deliver innovative new products and services to the South African economic landscape.” Tebogo Mokwena, Co-founder and CEO of Akiba Digital, a South African startup told IT News Africa. “[The office] further accelerates our country’s digital transformation and inclusive financial services, which in turn drive growth. This is what Akiba Digital is solving with AWS, cloud-based financial services that foster participation in AWS startup programs,” Mokwena said.
The company has thousands of active customers in Africa, from Absa, Investec, Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, University of Pretoria and Standard Bank. They use AWS to deliver flexibility, scalability and reliability. With the Cloud, businesses no longer need to plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver results faster.
