Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point, NAPAfrica, has announced that its members can now have direct access to the Microsoft Azure Peering Service and benefit from an SLA-backed, direct connection to Microsoft.
NAPAfrica is one of the first southern African partners for the new Microsoft Azure peering service. Andrew Owens, Manager of Interconnection & Peering at Teraco, says that enterprises looking for internet-first access to the cloud need robust and high-performing internet connectivity: “One of the options for clients to make this cloud transition is by using a peering service. The collaboration will assist in delivering reliable and performance-centric public connectivity to the Microsoft cloud.”
As a networking service, the solution enhances customer connectivity to Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics 365, software as a service (SaaS) services, Azure, or any Microsoft services accessible via the public internet.
Owens says that by connecting with NAPAfrica to Microsoft, clients will be accessing the shortest network path to the nearest edge point of presence (POP) in the Microsoft network: “Working in collaboration with service providers to provide highly reliable and optimised Internet connectivity to Microsoft services, the peering service also provides Internet latency telemetry and route monitoring, and alerting against hijacks, leaks and any other Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) misconfigurations.”
Also offered is latency optimisation and traffic monitoring with the Microsoft Azure Peering Service. Owens says that clients benefit from a qualified validation of the prefix, and if the correct edge location from Microsoft is assigned: “Our infrastructure is locally redundant and supports failover across multiple locations, offering geo-redundancy. This guarantees high-performance connectivity with the lowest possible latency. No minimum bandwidth is required either as the service is available at all NAPAfrica internet exchanges in South Africa, or wherever Microsoft is connected.”
