TANZANIA’s accelerating digital transformation is intensifying pressure on the country to expand reliable local data-storage infrastructure, industry experts have warned.

The concern comes as Wingu Africa yesterday launched its new Cloud Exchange platform in Dar es Salaam, a locally hosted cloud service designed to keep data within East African borders and reduce dependency on offshore systems.

Speaking at the launch in Dar es Salaam, Wingu Africa Country Director Huneid Ali described the platform as a response to increasing demand from businesses seeking secure and locally compliant data-management options. He thanked the government for creating conducive environment to facilitate smooth investment in technology and development .He said the service is intended to offer predictable costs, faster deployment and greater control over sensitive information.

Tanzania is the first market where the platform has been rolled out, with further expansion planned for Ethiopia and Djibouti. The platform includes computing, storage, security and Kubernetes services delivered from Wingu’s Dar es Salaam data centre.
But beyond the commercial launch, ICT experts say the development underscores a more urgent national challenge: the gap between Tanzania’s regulatory requirements and its existing digital infrastructure.
Nicholas Lodge, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Wingu Africa said: "The platform makes cloud adoption straightforward, compliant, predictable in cost, scalable on demand, and aligned with how organisations in the region actually operate." said the service is new to the country and integrates locally available systems and infrastructure to ensure that start-ups and businesses operate more efficiently.
He noted that national policies require all information and data — including those handled by financial institutions — to remain within Tanzania, making a local cloud system both timely and essential.
“This local cloud platform is well suited to our context and will make service delivery much easier. Wingu Cloud offers significant advantages, especially now that the government is investing heavily in digital transformation across all sectors,” he said.
Bilal Tofiki, Data Centre Manager at Wingu Tanzania added that start-ups will no longer be forced to seek expensive data servers abroad following the launch of a fully local cloud service.
“Safety is our priority,” he emphasised, thanking the government for creating a favourable investment environment in the ICT sector.
A representative from Data Vision Tanzania, said many organisations struggle to meet mandatory data-localisation rules due to the limited capacity of local data-hosting facilities.
“Policies require all sensitive data to remain in the country, and this is critical for national security and compliance,” he said. “However, the infrastructure available today is not yet sufficient for the scale of applications used by large institutions.”
He noted that the shortage forces companies to make difficult trade-offs between compliance, performance, and operational efficiency.
According to him, emerging cloud solutions, including those hosted locally — could significantly ease these pressures by offering the same capabilities as offshore providers while reducing latency and improving data security.