Analytics leader SAS has built on its global strategic partnership with Microsoft with the immediate availability of SAS Cloud on Microsoft Azure in South Africa. This forms part of an extensive go-to-market approach by the two organisations in South Africa designed to provide business customers with the ability to run their SAS workloads more easily in the cloud.
“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 HMS is a white glove service providing our solutions deployed on a robust, cloud-based infrastructure that has been tuned specifically for the proposed solution with dedicated high-touch 24x7x365 service and support,” says Stephan Wessels, SAS Head of Customer Advisory for South Africa.
“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 at Microsoft South Africa.
Previously, customers using the SAS Viya AI, analytics, and data platform had to provision it either in the UK or other regions where SAS data centres are hosted or had to put their own resources in place in South Africa.
This makes SAS the first analytics company with a cloud presence in South Africa. For financial services providers who have stringent compliance and regulatory requirements around data sovereignty, this local access is critically important. Furthermore, having the data and infrastructure hosted locally assists users with quicker performance, low latency, and faster time to insights. SAS is also providing end-to-end security to protect the entire environment to safeguard sensitive data against compromise.
“Through 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,” adds Essie Mokgonyana, Country Manager & Sales Director SAS in South Africa.
SAS HMS means organisations benefit from SAS’ 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.