Arica-wide neutral data centre, Teraco Data Environments, has become a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Connectivity partner to provide clients with private network connections to Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft Cloud Services, when Azure becomes generally available in 2018.

According to a statement from Teraco, clients will be able to connect directly to Azure ExpressRoute via the Teraco Cloud Exchange in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. The company says it will be one of the first to offer access to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute sites in Africa.

Lex van Wyk, CEO of Teraco, says the increasing trend towards hybrid cloud has driven a need for a secure connection between public cloud providers and physical data centres.

"Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute is a great addition to the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform and meets the significant demands of our collocated enterprise and service provider customers, who are building hybrid solutions based on Microsoft Cloud Technologies," said van Wyk.

Ross Ortega, Microsoft Azure, Networking Product Management says, "Teraco is an established data centre provider in Africa, providing the opportunity to bring the benefits of Microsoft Cloud Services to more partners and customers."

Teraco says according to research from IDG Connect, while organisations want to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and cost savings of the public cloud, they are uneasy about migrating further workloads due to concerns around connectivity, security and application performance.

"Significantly, respondents stated they would move 69% more workloads to the cloud if connectivity and security issues were resolved," the IDG Connect report states.

Teraco's van Wyk says the company has invested in its exchange, "to enable immediate activation of secure connections from our clients to Azure ExpressRoute."

In March this year, Teraco also announced that it had raised a medium-term funding facility from Absa amounting to R1.2 billion to fuel its Africa expansion.

Teraco's Chief Financial Officer, Jan Hnizdo said the funding would be used to further invest in the Teraco Campus in Isando, a town in Ekurhuleni in the Gauteng province of South Africa.