ECONET Wireless and its subsidiaries, including EcoCash and Econet InfraCo, have moved their operations fully onto Google Cloud – becoming the first major businesses in Zimbabwe to complete such a comprehensive cloud migration.
The project, which took almost a year to complete, represents a significant technology milestone for Zimbabwe and the wider African market.
The migration is expected to give Econet substantial competitive advantages, including stronger business continuity and the ability to recover rapidly from major disruptions or disasters. It will also help reduce service-delivery challenges, improve network resilience and enable the company to introduce new products and features much faster.
“This is the first major step in a multi-pronged strategy aimed at significantly improving our services for customers,” said Dr Douglas Mboweni, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe’s Group CEO.
“We are excited about our partnership with Google Cloud because of their extensive experience supporting businesses around the world.”
Dr Mboweni said customers would begin to experience the full benefits of the migration over the coming months, as Econet transfers its data to the new environment and fine-tunes the platform’s performance.
Econet also intends to expand the Google Cloud platform to provide cloud services to other large businesses and organisations in Zimbabwe.
“The advantages offered by the cloud are not limited to mobile operators,” Dr Mboweni said. “Large companies and governments around the world are moving their digital operations to the cloud.
“We recognise that many organisations in Zimbabwe do not have the dozens of specialist engineers required to operate a private cloud. Econet can manage that infrastructure on their behalf and provide it as a service. We have the necessary capabilities, including data centres and access to AI (artificial-intelligence) infrastructure.”
The development positions Econet to strengthen its own digital operations while supporting the wider adoption of cloud computing and AI-powered services across Zimbabwe.