OVHcloud and Maroc Datacenter to Open First Local Zone in Morocco
OVHcloud will be taking part in GITEX AFRICA Morocco 2024 in Marrakech. On this occasion, the group is announcing the first opening of a Local Zone on the African continent, with operations scheduled to begin in Rabat in the coming months. This news demonstrates OVHcloud’s commitment to offering trusted cloud solutions in Africa.
The announcement was made official with the signature of a partnership between Maroc Datacenter, a specialist in constructing and operating data centres in Morocco, and OVHcloud. This strong partnership will also see Maroc Datacenter support OVHcloud to tailor its offerings to the Moroccan market. In addition, OVHcloud announces further deployments, including the opening of Local Zones in South Africa, Kenya and Tunisia for 2025.
“We are delighted to partner with OVHcloud Group, a global player and the European leader in the cloud. The launch of a Local Zone in Morocco will contribute to empowering the kingdom’s digital ecosystem by offering innovative cloud platforms and providing public and private organisations with cloud services offering guarantees of data sovereignty and low latency. We are glad OVHcloud has chosen Morocco as the first country on the African continent to launch the Local Zone and has placed its trust in the Maroc Datacenter. We would like to thank Orange Morocco for supporting us in this launch by providing its national and international connectivity capabilities,” said Abderrahmane Mounir, Chairman of Maroc Datacenter.
As part of its global growth plan in the Cloud market, OVHcloud aims to open up to 150 Local Zones by 2026. Based on innovative technology, Local Zones enable the Group to deploy infrastructures as close as possible to its customers, using Edge Computing principles, to serve new international locations in just a couple of weeks. In addition to the Local Zones previously opened in Brussels, Madrid, Marseille, Prague, Amsterdam, Zurich and Dallas, the new Local Zone in Rabat offers Moroccan customers new opportunities to access the Group’s Public Cloud services, with reduced latency and local data hosting.
Thanks to this, Moroccan customers will benefit from the unique offering of OHVcloud for an open, trusted cloud, with data located as close as possible to the user. The data, hosted within the geographical limits defined by local regulations or security policies, allows customers to be confident: which proves essential for a number of industries, including consulting, financial services and healthcare.
Workloads with latency-sensitive services, such as real-time analytics, e-commerce websites, CDNs for streaming video and catch-up, and cloud gaming, will benefit from the Local Zone proximity for increased response times for a better user experience. For most customers, OVHcloud Local Zones offer single-digit millisecond latency times, enabling use cases such as high-performance gaming from the Cloud with very low latency.
“Today’s launch of the first Local Zone in Rabat is an important milestone in OVHcloud’s relationship with Morocco and confirms the Group’s ambition to extend its offering to organisations operating in Africa. From now on, companies and institutions will be able to take advantage of the Local Zones to rely on more secure, faster and more efficient services, facilitating the digital transformation of the Moroccan ecosystem before moving on to serve new locations on the continent. Known as one of the main technology hubs in Africa, Morocco is a strategic market for us, with specific features needs and high requirements, particularly in terms of data sovereignty,” said Caroline Comet-Fraigneau, Vice-President for France, Benelux, Africa and the Middle East at OVHcloud.
From the Local Zones, organisations can take advantage of Public Cloud features such as Compute, Block Storage and the network with a local public IP. Additional services will be offered in the coming months, including access to Object Storage and Managed Rancher Service for Kubernetes management, in multi-cloud environments. OVHcloud’s new Local Zones are also ISO/IEC 27001 certified, in addition to the requirements of ISO/IEC 27017 standards, specific to the cloud services industry and ISO/IEC 27018 for the protection of personal data. These certifications ensure that businesses can deploy services in an OVHcloud environment to meet the highest security standards.