Nigeria missing from Amazon VS Microsoft cloud battle

The race to dominate the cloud space may have been turned up a notch as Standard Bank Group has selected Amazon Web Service (AWS) as its preferred service provider. The news comes after AWS, this week clinched a key contract with Volkswagen AG. 

The bank disclosed this in a notice on its website.  

Standard Bank Group has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of migrating its production workloads, including its customer-facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud. Standard Bank Group will leverage AWS services, including data analytics and machine learning, to automate financial operations and enhance customer facing web and mobile applications.

In addition

The migration to AWS will take place across all business units, subject to approvals from local regulators, including Personal Banking, Wealth, Corporate Investment Banking, and Insurance, driving a more personalized banking and investment experience for customers.

South African Reserve bank, has approved the transaction.

What is cloud computing? Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. 

Nigeria is missing: Despite Nigeria being the largest (or second largest) economy in Africa the possibility of the country being the next battleground for the two tech giants is quite low.  

While there are a few local players such as Rack Centre, MTN and Mainone, the big two have been wary of setting up data centres here, with Microsoft setting up its data centres in South Africa.  

Epileptic power supply means data centers would have to run on alternate energy sources.  

About Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Azure began in the mid-2000s as an internal initiative codenamed Project Red Dog. The project was renamed Microsoft Azure, in 2014.

About Amazon AWS: Amazon Web Service (AWS) was launched in March 2006, combining the three initial service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2. The company has since grown to be one of the dominant cloud service providers in the world.