MainOne, West Africa’s leading communications Services Company for business , has announced that it has become the first Microsoft Azure Peering Services partner for West Africa, providing enterprises using Microsoft Cloud services with a secured, reliable and high performance experience relative to what is currently available in the market.

MainOne now offers enterprises improved performance in accessing Microsoft Cloud applications such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Teams, and other SaaS products. The new Microsoft Azure Peering Service will ensure that enterprises increasingly reliant on Microsoft Cloud services currently accessed over the public Internet enjoy consistent performance via secured routes for an improved end user experience. The service ensures customer data is delivered over a dedicated internet connection that is prioritized over the public internet on MainOne and Microsoft networks.

Speaking on the achievement, Anil Verma, Chief Technology Officer of MainOne says the growing migration towards cloud services by its customers informed the company’s collaboration with Microsoft to deploy this capability which guarantees predictable and reliable connection to Microsoft Cloud services.

“We have noted that an increasing number of Nigerian enterprises make use of SaaS applications due to the agility and ease of onboarding that it offers. With the impact of the global health pandemic, usage of such applications has further skyrocketed. However, unless Enterprise users put in place the right connectivity solution, cloud access suffers performance degradation over the public Internet. The Microsoft Azure Peering Services service directly addresses the connectivity challenges of accessing Microsoft Cloud applications by providing enterprises with the benefits of MainOne’s dedicated connection with Microsoft.

Jeffrey Cohen, Partner Program Manager, Azure Networking at Microsoft Corp. said; “We are pleased to extend Microsoft Azure Peering Service with MainOne. The service improves overall connectivity to Microsoft 365 and ensures each customer’s traffic takes the shortest path via MainOne into the nearest edge Point of Presence (PoP) on the Microsoft network.