Short answer
Sensitive data can remain in South African facilities. FirstNet Private Cloud runs in FirstNet data centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, with options for multi-region resilience as needed.
In detail
Your hosting options depend on the target platform:
- FirstNet Private Cloud: virtual machines and immutable backups in FirstNet's Durban, Johannesburg or Cape Town data centres
- Geographic disaster recovery: replication to a second FirstNet data centre in a different city
- Colocation: your own hardware in the FirstNet Durban data centre or Teraco sites in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban
- Microsoft 365 and Azure: Microsoft publishes per-service residency commitments in its Trust Center, and residency is documented in your tenant readiness review
- Offsite server backups: South African regions are available in the Veeam Data Cloud Vault Non-Core catalogue, subject to availability
Hybrid designs are common: regulated systems stay in a local private cloud while other workloads use Azure or AWS through private peering. FirstNet confirms the exact hosting and DR locations, and any residency wording, in your solution design. Compliance with POPIA is shared, so your configuration, data classification and governance also matter.
Source: FirstNet Cloud Migration & Modernization service page →
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