Johannesburg has become the first city in Africa to offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro, the dual-site connectivity tier that until now existed only in Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific.
Cassava Technologies said on 20 July 2026 that its Africa Data Centres business has been designated an Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location at its JHB1 facility in Johannesburg. That designation pairs JHB1 with Teraco’s JT1 site, the two distinct facilities ExpressRoute Metro requires, and places Johannesburg on a list of global technology hubs that had contained no African entry.
What ExpressRoute Metro actually changes
ExpressRoute is Microsoft’s private on-ramp to Azure: a dedicated circuit into a colocation facility that houses Microsoft’s edge routers, bypassing the public internet. A standard circuit is already built with a redundant pair of links, but both sit inside a single facility. If that one edge location is disrupted, the redundancy inside it does not help, and the connection can be lost entirely.
ExpressRoute Metro spreads the two connections across two separate peering facilities in the same city. A fire, power event or outage at one building no longer severs the link, because the second facility carries it. Microsoft offers the configuration at the same price as a standard circuit, which is what makes it attractive for banks, insurers and other operators of mission-critical workloads.
Johannesburg is the first place on the continent where that dual-site option exists. It maps to Azure’s South Africa North region, the local cloud footprint Microsoft began building out through partners including Liquid several years ago.
The managed layer on top
Cassava is not only providing the facility. Liquid C2, its cloud and cyber-security arm, will sell a managed service over the new capability called Secure CloudConnect, combining the private Azure connectivity with integrated security controls. Cassava says it is the only provider with an on-net presence at both Johannesburg peering locations, which is what lets it offer the resilient path end to end.
“Being designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location is a defining moment for Africa Data Centres as well as for Africa’s digital infrastructure,” said Ziaad Suleman, Senior Vice President of Cassava Technologies South Africa and Botswana. He tied the move to what the company calls its One Cassava model, in which the data-centre business and the cloud-security business are sold together.
Vukani Mngxati, chief executive of Microsoft South Africa, framed it around trust in local infrastructure. “South Africa isn’t waiting for the AI era, it’s helping to shape it, and that ambition rests on digital infrastructure the country can trust,” he said.
Why it matters
The announcement lands as African regulators sharpen their expectations around operational resilience, business continuity and data protection, pressures that push regulated firms toward connectivity they can demonstrate will stay up. A dual-site Azure path inside the country gives compliance teams a cleaner answer than a single-facility circuit or a link that leaves the continent.
It also reinforces Johannesburg’s position as the gravity well of Southern African cloud infrastructure, the same concentration of capacity that underpins the data-centre build-out now spreading to other African markets. Cassava Technologies, headquartered in the UK with roots across the continent, operates through units including Africa Data Centres, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Liquid C2, Cassava AI and Sasai Fintech, and reports a presence in 94 countries.
For now the practical takeaway is narrower and concrete: a South African business moving critical workloads to Azure can, for the first time, buy a private connection that survives the loss of an entire data centre without paying a premium for it.
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