South African businesses relying on Microsoft Azure for mission-critical applications just gained a significant reliability upgrade. Cassava Technologies announced on July 20, 2026, that its Africa Data Centres facility JHB1 in Johannesburg is now an Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location. It joins Teraco’s JT1 as the second endpoint within the Johannesburg metro, allowing organizations to use a single ExpressRoute circuit that spans two physically separate data centers. The result: a private connection to Azure that can survive the failure of one facility, cross-connect, or local path without needing a backup internet circuit.

A Second Path to Azure in Johannesburg

Standard Azure ExpressRoute gives companies a dedicated, private link into Microsoft’s cloud, bypassing the public internet for better performance, reliability, and security. But until now, Johannesburg-based users had just one physical peering location: Teraco’s JT1 data center. If a problem occurred at that site—whether a power outage, fiber cut, or hardware fault—the private cloud connection could go dark. ExpressRoute Metro changes that. Microsoft introduced this feature to allow a single circuit to connect to two peering locations within the same metro area. When one site goes down, traffic automatically fails over to the other, keeping your Azure workloads reachable.

With Africa Data Centres’ JHB1 now designated as a second peering point, South African organizations can finally build that redundancy natively. The two locations—Teraco JT1 and Africa Data Centres JHB1—are both connected to the Azure South Africa North region, so there’s no change in where your data resides or which services are available. It’s purely a connectivity enhancement at the physical layer.

Cassava Technologies, through its business units Africa Data Centres and Liquid C2, describes this as Africa’s first ExpressRoute Metro deployment. The company’s press release emphasizes that it’s “the only provider with an on-net presence in both locations,” meaning Liquid C2 can offer a managed service that bundles connectivity and security. They call it Secure CloudConnect, a fully managed service that combines resilient private Azure connectivity with integrated cyber security controls.

Redundancy at the Physical Layer

For network architects and cloud admins, the key benefit is clear: you can now design for a single ExpressRoute circuit that uses two distinct, geographically separate facilities. In the past, achieving this level of redundancy in Johannesburg required provisioning two separate ExpressRoute circuits (each linked to a different peering location, if you could even get a second one), which added cost and complexity. Now, a single circuit can be configured with two peering points out of the box. Microsoft’s documentation lists both Johannesburg Metro locations—Teraco JT1 and Africa Data Centres JHB1—as available for ExpressRoute Metro.

The failover happens at the physical connectivity layer, so it’s independent of your routing configuration. This matters for companies running production Azure environments: a fault in one data center won’t force you to reroute traffic over the internet or wait for the provider to fix a single point of failure. It’s resilience built into the circuit design itself.

But this isn’t just about avoiding outages. South African regulators have been tightening rules around operational resilience, business continuity, and risk management. For industries like finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, having a redundant private connection to the cloud can help meet compliance obligations by reducing the risk of extended downtime caused by a single-site failure.

Who Benefits—and Who Doesn’t

If you’re an everyday Windows user or even a Microsoft 365 administrator, you won’t see any direct change. ExpressRoute Metro is all about Azure connectivity, not your desktop or browser. The people who need to pay attention are network engineers, cloud architects, and IT managers responsible for:
- Line-of-business applications hosted in Azure Virtual Machines or Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure Virtual Desktop deployments
- Hybrid identity services (like Azure AD Connect) that synchronize on-prem directories to Azure AD
- Backup and disaster recovery setups that replicate data into Azure
- Any workload where a severed connection means business disruption

For these teams, the addition of JHB1 means they can revisit their ExpressRoute configurations. If you’re already using a standard ExpressRoute circuit that terminates at JT1, you can now upgrade to a Metro circuit—or simply reconfigure, depending on your provider—to include the JHB1 peering point. This might lower your monthly cost compared to running two separate circuits for redundancy. And if you haven’t yet adopted ExpressRoute because the single point of failure was a blocker, this development could tip the balance.

Liquid C2’s Secure CloudConnect will likely appeal to mid-market and regulated entities that want a hands-off approach. Instead of managing circuit provisioning, BGP peering, and security appliances themselves, they can buy a managed service that includes a Metro-backed private connection and integrated security. That could reduce the operational burden on internal teams and potentially speed up deployment.

Microsoft’s global network is expanding its footprint, but this move doesn’t add a new Azure region. Southern Africa remains served by the South Africa North region (with South Africa West available for disaster recovery). The improvements are entirely about how you reach that region, not where you can store data.

The Road to Metro-Style Resilience

Microsoft launched ExpressRoute Metro in 2022, initially in a handful of global metros like Amsterdam, London, and Singapore. The idea was to give enterprises a simpler way to achieve high availability at the connectivity layer—no need to juggle multiple circuits or rely on site-to-site VPNs as a fallback. Gradually, the list of supported metros expanded, and Johannesburg was an obvious candidate given the growing demand for Azure in the region.

Teraco’s JT1 had been the longstanding peering location in Johannesburg for ExpressRoute. Africa Data Centres, which Cassava acquired as part of its broader push into digital infrastructure, had been building out JHB1 to meet Azure’s stringent requirements for power, cooling, and connectivity. The designation as a Metro peering point is a stamp of approval that the facility meets Microsoft’s standards for reliability and low-latency connections.

The timing aligns with a broader trend across Africa: hyperscale cloud providers are investing more in local infrastructure, and enterprises are moving from proof-of-concept projects to production workloads that demand enterprise-grade resilience. Regulators are also stepping up their focus on operational resilience, particularly in South Africa’s financial sector, where the Prudential Authority and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority have issued guidelines on third-party risk and business continuity. A Metro ExpressRoute provides a tangible way to address those expectations.

Getting Started with Dual-Site Connectivity

If your organization already uses ExpressRoute in Johannesburg, here are the practical steps to consider:
1. Check provider support: Not all ExpressRoute partners may support Metro configurations immediately. Contact your connectivity provider (if you bought through a service provider) or check the Azure portal if you have a direct circuit. Liquid C2 has confirmed it will offer Secure CloudConnect with Metro support; other partners like Teraco may also offer similar options.
2. Review your circuit type: ExpressRoute circuits have different SKUs. Metro is available on the Premium SKU. If you’re on a Standard SKU, you may need to upgrade to Premium to use two peering locations.
3. Plan the failover design: While the circuit itself provides physical redundancy, you’ll still want to validate how your routers behave during a failover. Work with your network team to test the path to both peering points and ensure BGP sessions are properly configured to prefer the primary site while accepting the secondary when needed.
4. Evaluate managed services: If you’d rather offload the complexity, Liquid C2’s Secure CloudConnect is a bundled offering that includes ExpressRoute Metro connectivity plus security management. It could be a good fit for teams that want a single provider to handle the entire connectivity chain.
5. For new deployments: If you’re planning to set up ExpressRoute in Johannesburg for the first time, make sure you specify a Metro circuit with two peering locations from day one. That saves you the hassle of redesigning later.

Microsoft’s documentation at Azure ExpressRoute locations and providers now lists both JT1 and JHB1 under Johannesburg Metro. You can also use the Azure portal to create a new circuit and select the Metro location; it will guide you through choosing the appropriate provider and peering points.

What Comes Next

This designation is more than a new listing on a website. It signals that cloud resilience in Africa is maturing from a nice-to-have to a must-have. With Johannesburg now joining the ranks of global metros offering ExpressRoute Metro, pressure will likely grow for other African hubs—Cape Town, Nairobi, Lagos—to follow suit. Microsoft has been steadily expanding its Azure presence on the continent, and as more organizations demand carrier-grade reliability for hybrid and cloud-native workloads, we can expect more peering locations to come online.

For now, South African IT leaders have a clear path: they can finally build private Azure connectivity that doesn’t put all their eggs in one data center basket. Whether they manage it themselves or hand it off to a partner, the outcome is the same—fewer outages, faster recovery, and a stronger foundation for the digital services that businesses and citizens rely on.