Short answer
It depends on the workload. FirstNet Private Cloud suits dedicated, locally hosted virtual infrastructure with predictable building-block costs, while Azure suits hyperscale and platform-as-a-service workloads. Many organisations use both, connected through private peering, and FirstNet can deliver either.
In detail
A practical way to decide:
- Private Cloud: lift-and-shift of existing VMware or Hyper-V servers, regulated or latency-sensitive systems that should stay in South Africa, and predictable consumption per vCPU, GB of RAM and GB of storage
- Azure: platform services, global scalability, development and burst workloads, and Azure Virtual Desktop
- Both: hybrid designs where sensitive systems stay private and other workloads use Azure, connected privately
FirstNet Private Cloud runs in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, with a virtual firewall and immutable Veeam backups as the recommended baseline. Azure is delivered through FirstNet's Microsoft CSP agreement, with landing zone design, FinOps and a single rand invoice.
Note that Private Cloud is not a public-cloud-style multi-region active/active service: site failover is handled with geographic DR to a second FirstNet data centre. A discovery workshop maps each workload to the right platform before any migration timeline is set.
Source: FirstNet Cloud Migration & Modernization service page →
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