Kenyan fully automated cloud infrastructure startup Angani today formally launched its cloud and hosting services, which it says are focused on the small and medium enterprise (SME) market and the financial services and media industries.
Disrupt Africa reported in February Angani, which claims to be the first fully automated cloud infrastructure company in East Africa, had closed a seed funding round, led by Invested Development with participation from Africa’s Talking, Savannah Fund, and Africa Angels Network.
That funding has now been utilised to officially launch services, with the Angani offering including virtual office services such as email and data backup, CCTV storage and backup, and media storage and payout.
The startup said the services will enable businesses to leverage the flexibility of the cloud for data workloads such as enterprise applications and web applications.
Angani’s cloud services are certified for meeting high-quality operational standards in a secure environment, and allow clients to host their own virtual data environments in the cloud or utilise pre-existing services.
“Our clients can benefit from the Angani cloud by taking up the space the require and only increasing the capacity when they need to. This will deliver significant cost savings and efficiency coupled with our experience gained from many years of managing cloud services,” said Phares Kariuki, chief executive officer (CEO) of Angani.
“Businesses have for a long time spent millions of shillings for IT infrastructure that they thought they would require at some point in the future. Angani cloud services will now allow organisations to pay for the capacity they need and easily upgrade when the need arises.”
Angani also announced partnerships with local data centre operators that will make it safe and cost effective to provision cloud solutions. The startup says its users can obtain a new server, operational in a secure, reliable data centre, within 15 minutes.
Speaking during the launch, Victor Kyalo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Authority (ICTA), praised the founders of Angani for launching cloud services in Kenya.
“The cost of setting up IT services in Kenya will now be reduced with the setup of cloud infrastructure. Businesses will no longer need to buy expensive IT infrastructure for their operations. They can now lease the capacity that they require and easily upgrade when the need arises,” he said.
“The cost of bandwidth is also poised to go down as more companies use locally hosted services. The main barrier to affordable internet connectivity, at the moment, is the cost of international transit links.”
