Our computing future is in the cloud, we all know this. The problem though is that for many people in Africa is one of latency, making viable use of data-centres unviable for many. One of the reasons for this is the massive expenses that go into building these traditionally large datacentres which are usually located in large cities. That doesn’t …

Microsoft is headed towards the cloud and while Nintendo and Sony will always be primary competition in the gaming space, they won’t be considered rivals to the Xbox brand in the decade to come.

More than a year ago in a live stream, Ubisoft promised that Rainbow Six Siege servers would go live in South Africa. They were working on the information that Microsoft’s Azure datacentres would soon be deployed in the region, but that took a little longer than anticipated. Then, once they were finally available, the Azure datacentres were limited; used primarily for business cases.

Huawei's week looks to only be getting worse with news that Microsoft is stopping sales of their products.

Today Microsoft announced the rollout of two new datacenters with hyperscale hardware in South Africa, located in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. These are the first Azure servers in the region that form part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy, and services using Azure will now be able to be run locally. This is a big benefit to local business and start-ups …

The Kinect struggled to gain traction in the gaming market, but has found some big usage in other industries, something which Microsoft has realised in their next iteration of the innovative device.

Getting multiplayer servers set up for games is a challenge, on top of all the work that goes into making games themselves. There’s an awful lot to contemplate, including the type of hardware, how many players to expect, the sorts of matchmaking types to support and an awful lot more. It’s why dedicated servers that run in the cloud – on systems like Amazon’s Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Microsoft wants even more developers to use Azure.

Microsoft – and Xbox’s future – is probably somewhere in the cloud. There’s already speculation that the next Xbox will stream games from the internet, although there’ll still be a traditional console available. Microsoft has now given us a glimpse of how things could work, with the unveiling of Project xCloud.