FEATURE
THERE ARE
VARIOUS
FACTORS THAT
LOCAL AFRICAN
BUSINESSES
SHOULD
CONSIDER WHEN
CHOOSING
TO BUILD OR
PURCHASE
SPACE IN A
DATA CENTRE.
ith continued and sustained
growth in Internet penetration
and connectivity, some of
the foundations begin to be in place for
a deeper and more meaningful Digital
Transformation in Africa. In Sub-Saharan
Africa, mobile penetration reached 44% in
2018, catalysing an uptake in demand for
data for both business and personal use.
With 41% of the population under the age
of 15, the region is also home to a market
of digital natives hungry for modern
technological services – this, combined
with the availability of increasingly
affordable smartphones and mobile data
plans, means demand for all things digital
in the region is on the rise.
Building data centres that can cope with
these rising requirements is critical to
driving this Digital Transformation. With new
technologies such as IoT, cloud and content
delivery networks fuelling both consumer
and business demand for high-velocity, high-
availability services, a more localised IT and
data infrastructure is essential.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Africa has been largely stymied by a lack of
adequate data centre infrastructure.
Existing infrastructure is not equipped to
cater to ever-growing server space, power
and cooling requirements. By building
a modern, state-of-the-art data centre
infrastructure, Africa can benefit not only
from improved digital services, but also
significant socioeconomic growth.
The role of data centres in
economic and social growth
The economic value of the Internet in Africa
is unsurprisingly strong, with research from
McKinsey claiming that the Internet can
increase productivity on the continent for a
multitude of sectors, including education,
healthcare, financial services, agriculture,
retail and government. According to the
Internet Society, the Internet contributes
to 3.7% of developed countries’ GDP on
average. In African countries, however, this
lies at just 1.1%.
Building and utilising local data centres
is vital to boosting this figure and
driving economic growth. For instance,
the Internet Society identifies a lack of
local content infrastructure and content
delivery networks (CDN) as a key barrier
to achieving wider Internet use. Hosting
content in local data centres significantly
reduces the latency and cost of content
delivery, which will ultimately improve
its accessibility for local communities.
Capitalising on opportunities such as
these is vital as the mobile CDN market
is set to become a major driver of data
traffic growth in Africa, with CDN traffic
predicted to exceed 70% of total online
traffic in the next five years.
Modern data centres in Africa will not
only help meet these needs, but also
serve as hubs to connect the region to the
wider global data economy; facilitating
economic and social development. A growing colocation data centre market
will also facilitate job creation and
cultivate local partners, such as cloud
service and other third-party service
providers who will be able to deliver
higher quality, more reliable services to
their customers from within modern data
centres. For instance, new data centres in
South Africa alone are predicted to create
over 100,000 jobs.
Despite the dramatic rise in both terrestrial
and mobile connectivity over the past 10
years, broader Digital Transformation in As demand for data centres rises, data
centre operators will inevitably require
more staff and create more IT training
Issue 08
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