Following the recent inauguration of its Tier III AngoNAP datacentre facility in Fortaleza, Brazil, Angola Cables has launched a single platform 'Cloud as a Service to the Africa market.

The service is expected to meet a strong demand from companies operating across Africa "who are looking to innovate and accelerate their digital capabilities, without having to incur additional software licensing and other operating costs."

Angola Cables asserts that 'Cloud as a Service' improves business efficiencies, increases productivity and reduces some of the high costs and complexities associated with the purchase and maintenance of IT hardware and infrastructure.

António Nunes, chief executive of Angola Cables says, "Given Africa's high number of mobile subscribers, cloud-based applications offer the opportunity to adopt and embrace evolving digital technologies that can advance economic development and cultural change. We are already seeing a steady increase in investments being made by governments, banking and financial institutions and other businesses on the continent in using the cloud to deliver more secure, user-friendly applications and services to their customers."

The cloud service will be made available via the AngoNAP datacentres in Luanda and AngoNAP Fortaleza Tier III in Brazil with direct linkages to the low latency South Atlantic (SACS) and Monet cable systems "within scaleable, secure, co-location environments."

It is targeted at a broad market, from large multinationals to OTT content providers, backhaul providers, ISP's and high data volume users "share data across the continents of Africa and South America and the rest of the world."

The company refers to research conducted by World Wide Worx entitled Cloud Africa 2018, which claims the continent's appetite for Cloud services is growing at an unparalleled rate.

The research suggests that whilst some areas within Africa are not able to utilise the full benefits of Cloud-linked computing - and its various applications, due to slow or erratic internet connections, uptake by companies - both medium and large in using the Cloud has more than doubled since 2013.