Analytics leader SAS has extended its global partnership with Microsoft to make SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure immediately available in South Africa.
This forms part of an extensive go-to-market approach by the two organisations designed to provide business customers with the ability to run their SAS workloads more easily in the cloud.
“SAS is a strategic partner for Microsoft, and the availability of SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure in the local market is just another way we are working together to help enterprises leverage the power of cloud to accelerate growth,” says Ravi Baht, chief technology officer of Microsoft South Africa.
Stephan Wessels, SAS head of customer advisory for South Africa, says: “Underpinned by the Azure cloud platform, we can now offer a range of locally deployed SAS hosted managed services (HMS) designed to unlock the full potential of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to South African corporate users across all industry verticals.
SAS claims that this makes it the first analytics company with a cloud presence in South Africa.
He explains that SAS HMS is the company's white glove service, with the company's solutions deployed on a cloud-based infrastructure that has been tuned specifically for the proposed solution with dedicated high-touch 24x7x365 service and support.
Having SAS HMS in place means organisations can benefit from SAS’s experience to configure the optimal hardware for the proposed SAS solution, which is critical for organisations that may lack the experience, expertise, or manpower to effectively deploy enterprise-class solutions, the company states.
Essie Mokgonyana, country manager and sales director of SAS in South Africa, adds: “Previously, customers using the SAS Viya AI, analytics, and data platform had to provision it either in the UK or other regions where SAS datacentres are hosted, or had to put their own resources in place in South Africa. Thanks to this partnership with Microsoft, we can now enable local businesses to run our technology end-to-end, while we also take care of all the operational responsibility, leaving the customer to focus on reaching its own strategic objectives.”
SAS claims that this makes it the first analytics company with a cloud presence in South Africa.
The company adds that for financial services providers who have stringent compliance and regulatory requirements around data sovereignty, this local access is critically important. Having the data and infrastructure hosted locally assists users with quicker performance, low latency and faster time to insights.
SAS says it is also providing end-to-end security to protect the entire environment to safeguard sensitive data against compromise.
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