From Maritime Gateway to Digital Hub: Mauritius Telecom's Cloud Transformation
Title: From Maritime Gateway to Digital Hub: Mauritius Telecom's Cloud Transformation
Content: From the lush green coastlines of sugarcane fields to the bustling financial center of Port Louis, Mauritius, known as the "Pearl of the Indian Ocean," is boldly heading into the digital future. As Africa's most competitive high-income economy, this multicultural island nation, guided by a national ICT blueprint, is transforming cloud technology into a vital link between its rich maritime heritage and its ambitious future roadmap.
At the center of this transformation is Mauritius Telecom, the nation's digital leader. The company has evolved from laying cables to providing island-wide broadband, transitioning from a traditional telecommunications company to a cloud-enabled digital technology partner. Now, with a strategic partnership with Huawei Cloud Stack, Mauritius Telecom is accelerating both digital and AI transformation across the island.
From Communication Networks to a Key Digital Engine
Mauritius Telecom is pivotal to the country's digital transformation, serving as a cornerstone of national telecom infrastructure and digital development by offering fixed voice, mobile communications, broadband access, data centers, and ICT services. The Government of Mauritius launched the Digital Mauritius 2030 Strategic Plan in 2018 to modernize the nation's digital infrastructure. This initiative focuses on building strong and secure foundations, enhancing digital sovereignty, and embracing emerging technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and 5G. In line with this vision, Mauritius Telecom has significantly invested in 5G networks, data centers, cloud platforms, and next-gen technologies—crucial for the country's digital framework. The company began its cloud journey as early as 2010 and by 2020 had started constructing Tier-4 data centers with outsourced Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities. Mauritius Telecom aims to become Africa's leading digital service provider, acting as a bridge between Asia and Africa, integrating AI, ICT, and green initiatives, and driving the growth of Mauritius's digital economy. In pursuing this mission, Mauritius Telecom provides comprehensive digital services to government, enterprises, and individual customers nationwide.
Eliminating Decades of Technical Debt
Traditionally, telecom carriers developed standalone IT architectures that were time-consuming to deploy, challenging to manage, and costly, leading to low resource utilization. These legacy systems were insufficient for quickly rolling out and scaling enterprise-grade services. As its business diversified, Mauritius Telecom needed a unified, efficient, and scalable cloud foundation to support both internal IT workloads and B2B services, which was essential for its transformation into a digital service provider. Additionally, Mauritius Telecom required a platform capable of delivering integrated services that combined cloud, network, device, security, and data center capabilities to ensure comprehensive data security.
With these objectives in mind, Mauritius Telecom formed a strategic partnership with Huawei Cloud Stack. This collaboration allowed Mauritius Telecom to build a robust local cloud infrastructure to support both its internal IT systems and B2B services.
The complete on-premises cloud platform is hosted in Mauritius Telecom's local data center, offering IaaS, container, database, file storage, and object storage services. It is centrally deployed and maintained, ensuring security and control while facilitating auto-scaling and automated operations.
Internal Transformation: Mauritius Telecom has created a future-ready platform that consolidates and enhances its big data, network management, and DevOps platforms. This integrated platform supports legacy services like cloud security, databases, and big data while providing disaster recovery solutions to ensure service availability. By unifying cloud, network, device, security, and data center capabilities, the platform provides all-in-one services with end-to-end data security, resulting in improved resource provisioning efficiency and operational agility. Resource utilization has increased by 50%, significantly lowering the total cost of ownership.
External Growth: The cloud platform allows Mauritius Telecom to expand its B2B services more effectively. In 2024, Mauritius Telecom launched my.t Cloud, a Cloud+ICT service portfolio aimed at enterprise customers, bolstering its presence in the local B2B market. Currently, Mauritius Telecom offers high-quality cloud services to many public-sector clients, including the Economic Development Board (EDB), National Housing Development Company (NHDC), and various research institutions and universities, facilitating digital transformation across the public sector. Its cloud services also reach businesses in finance, manufacturing, and the Internet sector. To date, Mauritius Telecom has doubled its B2B customer base, creating a new annual revenue stream of US$10 million.
Fueled by the cloud, Mauritius Telecom has transformed from a traditional telecommunications company into a digital service leader, contributing to a new chapter in Africa's digital transformation. The year 2025 marks the start of Mauritius Telecom's Cloud 3.0 initiative, which aims to integrate advanced capabilities like AI and big data, developing an intelligent service platform and expanding into new areas such as smart cities, digital government, and industry-specific clouds. Through continuous innovation and ecosystem partnerships, Mauritius Telecom is set to drive stronger momentum in the nation's digital transformation, firmly establishing Mauritius as a premier digital hub in Africa.