From Maritime Gateway to Digital Hub: Mauritius Telecom’s Cloud Transformation

From the lush, green coastlines of sugarcane fields to the bustling financial center of Port Louis, Mauritius, the “Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” is charting a bold course into the digital future. As Africa’s most competitive, high-income economy, this multicultural island nation, guided by a national ICT blueprint, is turning cloud technology into a vital bridge between its storied maritime heritage and its ambitious roadmap for the future.

At the heart of this transformation is Mauritius Telecom, the nation’s digital champion. The company has moved beyond laying cables to serving island-wide broadband, and from a traditional telco to a cloud-enabled digital technology partner. Now, backed by a strategic partnership with Huawei Cloud Stack, Mauritius Telecom is helping accelerate both digital and AI transformation across this island nation.

From Communication Networks to a Crucial Digital Engine

Mauritius Telecom is central to the country’s digital transformation. They are a cornerstone of national telecom infrastructure and digital development, providing fixed voice, mobile communications, broadband access, data centers, and ICT services. In 2018, the Government of Mauritius launched the Digital Mauritius 2030 Strategic Plan, an initiative aimed at modernizing the nation’s digital infrastructure.

The plan emphasizes building robust and secure foundations, strengthening digital sovereignty, and adopting emerging technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and 5G. In alignment with this vision, Mauritius Telecom has made significant investments in 5G networks, data centers, cloud platforms, and next-generation technologies—all critical to the country’s digital foundation.

The company began its cloud journey as early as 2010 and, by 2020, had started building Tier-4 data centers with outsourced Infrastructure‑as‑a‑Service (IaaS) capabilities. Mauritius Telecom’s stated mission is to become Africa’s leading digital service provider, act as a bridge between Asia and Africa, promote the integration of AI, ICT, and green initiatives, and fuel the growth of Mauritius’s digital economy. In fulfilling this mission, Mauritius Telecom delivers comprehensive digital services to government, enterprise, and individual customers nationwide.

Wiping Out Decades of Technical Debt

Traditionally, carriers build standalone IT architectures, but they take a lot of time to deploy, are difficult to manage, suffer from low resource utilization, and are expensive. These legacy systems proved inadequate for rapidly 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.

This foundation was essential to enabling its transformation from a traditional telco to a digital service provider. Furthermore, Mauritius Telecom needed a platform capable of delivering one-stop services, integrating cloud, network, device, security, and data center capabilities to ensure end-to-end data security.

With these goals in mind, Mauritius Telecom entered into a strategic partnership with Huawei Cloud Stack. Using this platform, Mauritius Telecom built a solid local cloud infrastructure to support both its internal IT systems and B2B services.

The entire on‑premises cloud platform is deployed in Mauritius Telecom’s local data center, where it delivers IaaS, container, database, file storage, and object storage services. It is centrally deployed and maintained, guaranteeing security and controllability while supporting auto‑scaling and automated O&M.

Internal transformation: Mauritius Telecom has developed a future-ready platform that consolidates and enhances its big data, network management, and DevOps platforms. This integrated platform supports legacy services, including cloud security, databases, and big data, while also providing disaster recovery (DR) solutions to guarantee service availability and laying a solid foundation for future digital services. By unifying cloud, network, device, security, and data center capabilities, the platform delivers one-stop services with end-to-end data security. The result is significantly improved resource provisioning efficiency and operational agility. Resource utilization has increased by 50%, substantially reducing total cost of ownership.

External growth: The cloud platform enables Mauritius Telecom to expand its B2B services more efficiently. In 2024, Mauritius Telecom launched the my.t Cloud, a Cloud+ICT service portfolio targeting enterprise customers. This move strengthened its presence in the local B2B market. Today, Mauritius Telecom provides high-quality cloud services to many public-sector customers, including the nation’s Economic Development Board (EDB), National Housing Development Company (NHDC), and several research institutions and universities, accelerating digital transformation across the public sector.

Its cloud services also extend to businesses in finance, manufacturing, and the Internet sector. To date, Mauritius Telecom has doubled its B2B customer base, creating a new revenue stream worth US$10 million annually. Powered by the cloud, Mauritius Telecom has evolved from a traditional telco to a digital service leader, helping to write a new chapter for digital transformation in Africa.

The year 2025 marks the beginning of Mauritius Telecom’s Cloud 3.0 initiative. By integrating advanced capabilities like AI and big data, the operator is now building an intelligent service platform and expanding into new domains such as smart cities, digital government, and industry-specific clouds. Through continuous innovation and ecosystem partnerships, Mauritius Telecom is poised to inject stronger momentum into the nation’s digital transformation, firmly establishing Mauritius as a premier digital hub in Africa