Google joins race to be top Africa cloud service

● This week’s announcement that Google will open a cloud region in SA completes the last piece of the cloud puzzle for the country and the continent.

Until this week, Google was the only one of the “big five” global cloud providers that had not announced a cloud region, the industry term for a local data centre, in SA. The hyperscalers, as operators of giant cloud data centres are known, are in a race to be the preferred providers for cloud and data services across Africa.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud had all announced a cloud presence here, as had China’s Huawei Cloud and Japan’s NTT.

With Google being the thirdbiggest cloud provider in the world after AWS and Microsoft, its entry closes the last gap in major cloud offerings here. It also means a wider range of services, features and functionality will become available at a lower cost, while access to the cloud for the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa becomes more feasible.

While Google has not divulged details of location or physical infrastructure, Niral Patel, director of Google Cloud Africa, told Business Times it would offer “what you would expect from a cloud data centre or cloud region, in the form of storage, network and compute, but then it also includes Google AI (artificial intelligence) machine learning (ML) and data analytics”.

The data centre is part of a $1bn (R17.9bn) commitment to Google’s presence announced last year by CEO Sundar Pichai. More significantly, it promises a huge contribution to the continent’s GDP and job market.

“The effect we see in terms of contribution is about $2.1bn to GDP and circa 40,000 jobs that it will create by 2030,” says Patel. “It’s part of the Google for Africa five-year plan that we launched last year.

“For SA, specifically, the first thing we’ll be able to do is create the opportunity for organisations to modernise, where previously data locality or residency sovereignty and latency requirements meant cloud was not an option. It also allows organisations, whether an enterprise, mid-market, or a start-up, to deploy the solutions closer to users and thereby improving user experience responsiveness times.”

The cloud region will be served by Google’s Equiano undersea cable, which made landfall at Melbosstrand near Cape Town in August. It is the highest-capacity cable yet to connect Africa, at 144 terabits per second.

Gregory MacLennan, CEO of Digicloud, Google’s only reseller enablement partner in Africa, points to the cable as the last piece of the puzzle that Google had to put in place: “The creation of a Google Cloud region is of critical importance for the continent as Google is now the only hyperscaler bringing both an undersea cable and region to Africa. This is important as it means that, when customers connect to the

(cloud) region or to an edge location in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nairobi or Lagos, they will be on Google’s secure network from the get go.

“All Google regions will be on the same Google network with the same Google security, unlike other hyperscalers, which have not brought their networks to Africa but rather just local presences. The effect on this for latency and compliance with various data residency regulations is huge.”

MacLennan says Google will also be upgrading its points of presence in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi, where it has “interconnects” or onramps to the cloud.

“We expect demand for Google’s

AI, ML and open-source technologies to grow significantly on the back of this investment and our resellers have been building towards this for several years now. We believe that this will significantly grow the existing partner network and grow Google’s presence.”

The effect we see in terms of contribution is about $2.1bn to GDP and circa 40,000 jobs … by 2030

Niral Patel

Google Cloud Africa director