Orange Middle East & Africa (OMEA) and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) have partnered to bring AWS Wavelength Zones to Morocco and Senegal to enable public and private organisations leverage AWS Wavelength infrastructure and services, and benefit from AWS security, scalability, and reliability.
With the introduction of AWS Wavelength Zones in Morocco and Senegal, customers can build applications using AWS services installed within Orange’s network. This setup will allow for secure local data processing and storage, delivering low-latency user experiences. These Wavelength Zones are the first in North and West Africa to be accessible through both wireless and wireline (internet) connections, enabling customers to deploy and run applications locally on AWS compute and storage located in Orange data centres.
CEO at Orange Middle East and Africa, Jérôme Hénique, stated, “The announcement of AWS Wavelength Zones for North & West Africa is a major achievement in our strategy to foster the cloud transformation of African businesses. We are providing the benefits of AWS to Moroccan and Senegalese organizations, from SMBs to MNCs, while ensuring data residency in secure Orange Datacenters in combination with our best-in-class connectivity solutions.”
AWS Wavelength enables developers to support use cases in high-trust, regulated industries such as telecom, finance, public sector, and healthcare, as well as industries that depend on low-latency applications like gaming. By extending AWS services locally, customers can seamlessly connect back to the full range of cloud services running in an AWS Region, ensuring data remains local and secure while maintaining high performance.
“The deployment of AWS Wavelength Zones in North and West Africa, in collaboration with Orange, will further empower customers in growing geographies with local AWS services.” Vice president of EC2 Edge at AWS, Jan Hofmeyr, said. He added, “Customers of all sizes and industries in Morocco and Senegal will be able to access local AWS compute and storage for data residency, low latency, and security needs for applications across real-time gaming and regulated industries, helping customers unlock new innovation and accelerate digital transformation.”
The demand for cloud services in Africa is growing rapidly, with the Infrastructure as a Service & Platform as a Service industries expected to grow by 18% annually, reaching $13 billion by 2028. The new AWS Wavelength Zones will help meet compliance requirements for applications needing locally-hosted data, further supporting Africa’s embrace of cloud services.
Orange, as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, will leverage the new local infrastructure capabilities to foster cloud adoption in Africa. The company will also be an anchor customer for the AWS Wavelength Zones, running some of its IT workloads in-country and accelerating its digital transformation efforts.
AWS offers a comprehensive range of cloud services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EMR, and Application Load Balancer as part of Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). With AWS Wavelength, customers can use the same AWS APIs, tools, and functionality they are familiar with to build their applications.
Source: Orange Middle East and Africa
By Derrick Kafui Deti – Digital Economy Magazine
