Cisco Launches New Umbrella Cloud Security Data Centres In South Africa

Cisco South Africa has this month launched two Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, offering local customers closer access to the cloud anytime, anywhere.

“South Africa is a key market for Cisco and this level of investment underscores our commitment to the region,” says Garsen Naidu, general manager for Cisco in sub-Saharan Africa.

“South Africa is also an important market for Cisco in the country’s goals to service multinational companies (MNCs), due to its unique geographical location, emerging economy and access to the sub-Saharan market. A local data centre in country will provide these MNCs with scalable and improved performance when using Cisco Umbrella Cloud Security services.”

Through this announcement, customers in South Africa and in the region will have access to top notch cybersecurity protection without having to sacrifice performance.

Umbrella’s cloud security services such as DNS, Cloud-Delivered Firewall (CDFW), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Intrusion Protection and Detection Systems (IPS/IDS) and other data defence services are now available to customers looking to protect digital assets from malicious threats.

“Customers will also have complete visibility of online activities across their environments, users, and devices at all times,” adds Naidu.

Both Cisco’s Johannesburg and Cape Town facilities connect to NAPAfrica Internet Exchange, which ensures that the fastest route to online resources is always selected. These data centres also have access to Umbrella’s 1 000+ peering partners, SaaS, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) worldwide, thereby improving application performance.

“The upgrades to these edge data centres expand our rapidly growing global network. Due to our innovative global cloud architecture and anycast routing, most customers in these regions will automatically connect to the upgraded data centres,” says Naidu. “And, while we strive to maintain high uptime for all of our data centres, our augmented routing solution seamlessly and automatically routes traffic to the next nearest data centre if for any reason a data centre is unavailable.

“At its core, what all of this means is customers can expect a robust, high speed, low latency, always-on, secure connection to their cloud applications,” he concludes.