We are excited to announce the launch of our first data center on the Africa continent in Johannesburg! With this latest addition to our global network, customers will experience enhanced website performance with decreased latency, enjoy sub-second response time and security in the South Africa market and other surrounding countries.

We believe this market will grow and are actively building the foundation needed to give our customers the highest possible level of service and help them fight cybercrime. The presence of the data center will also better serve local businesses and customers, and help our global customers reach this important market and grow their business.

Fast Facts About South Africa

  • South Africa has about 22 million internet users, approximately 40 percent of the population.  The Internet for All initiative aims to connect 22 million unconnected users to the internet by 2020.
  • South Africa has 29 million smartphone users.
  • South Africa has the second largest economy in Africa.

Location Matters

Until the launch of the data center in Johannesburg, Incapsula customers in South Africa received service from remote data centers in locations such Frankfurt, Paris and Dubai. Customers are extremely sensitive to network latency and will leave a site if it is not highly responsive, and possibly not return. A local data center solves these latency issues and improves user experience by bringing website content closer to visitors.

A local data center also helps facilitate compliance with laws and regulations that stipulate that certain types of data, such as data in government sites, must be stored and served only from local servers.

We’ve already seen performance improvement with the launch of the data centers.

Network performance report after the launch of the data center in Johannesburg.

Securing Websites

As part of our global network, the new data center in Johannesburg positions us to mitigate even the largest attacks in the region with no disruption to ongoing website and network operations.

As the security needs of our customers grow, the data center offers our full suite of award-winning DDoS protection services, including:

  • Network layer DDoS scrubbing with 24×7 monitoring and mitigation, which typically is activated in <1 second.
  • Always-on application layer protection, including blocking the OWASP top 10, with PCI and SOC certification, based on proprietary algorithms
  • Infrastructure protection for subnets and individual IP addresses that add new layers of protection on top of the clean pipes services of ISPs
  • Name server protection for DNS-targeted attacks

In addition to DDoS protection, the new data center also incorporates our website performance and security services, including:

  • Global CDN for intelligent caching and content optimization
  • Web application firewall (WAF) to protect against data breaches
  • Load balancer for maximum application availability and performance
  • IP security to ensure private and secure communications

Building Lasting Partnerships

Incapsula selects its infrastructure providers to provide quality services and high availability. A main criteria we look for is a provider’s strong presence in the market. The Incapsula data center is therefore collocated with one of the top providers in the country.

Our high capacity Behemoth 2 platforms provide capacity for the anticipated usage, and are built to scale for more capacity when the usage grows. Our data center architecture ensures that all components are redundant, providing uninterrupted service from the data center.

With the addition of the new data center, Incapsula now has 40 data centers around the world with over 5 Tbps total capacity.

To support our expanding business in strategic areas around the globe, additional PoPs are under construction and are scheduled to come online in 2018. The PoP in Johannesburg now connects the Incapsula network to South Africa with minimal latency.

Would you like to write for our blog? We welcome stories from our readers, customers and partners. Please send us your ideas: blog@incapsula.com