FEATURE
programmes; a particularly promising
prospect when considering Africa’s
youthful population will directly cause
GDP to grow by 11% to 15% over the next
decade, by which time they will have
entered working age. Additionally, with
the advent of Edge Computing and hybrid
cloud, there will be demand for specialised
IT skills, in turn bringing a number of
highly skilled, well-paid jobs to the region.
Choosing the right data centre for
your business
As the popularity of new technologies
such as IoT and cloud continue to grow
amongst African consumer and business
markets, data centre operators are racing
to satisfy these new demands. While data
centre modernisation can facilitate greater
IT agility and lower costs, building a data
centre is no easy feat.
Businesses should look to cost-effective
and flexible alternatives, for instance
housing hardware in colocation facilities, or
renting from a cloud hosting provider.
Outsourcing will allow businesses to not
only get their services up and running faster
but will also require less upfront investment.
There are various factors that local
African businesses should consider when
choosing to build or purchase space in a
data centre.
Selecting a local colocation data centre
facility or provider that is close to key
customer markets ensures that they will
benefit from low latency connectivity,
in turn helping to create a consistent
regional service that meets market
demand and satisfies customer needs.
Additionally, choosing a data centre that is
close to a business hub facilitates ease of
access; allowing business owners to visit
their IT environment, supervise staff and
keep a close eye on their operations.
Power and network accessibility is another
critical aspect when selecting a data
centre, and will serve as the foundation
of a reliable operating environment. While
the location of a data centre will rely
upon factors such as access to power
grids, businesses should also consider
the redundancy of the systems that data
centre operators have put in place.
To ensure stable connectivity and
continuous uptime, businesses should
look to data centres that guarantee
minimal downtime, for instance
Tier III colocation facilities. Built to
satisfy redundancy and concurrent
maintainability requirements, Tier III
data centres are designed to ensure a
Robert Mullins, Executive Director of
First Brick Holdings
maximum level of availability. Selecting
a data centre with these capabilities
is particularly critical for businesses
who run high-velocity, high-availability
operations and will help them to avoid
financial losses and reputational damage
during power outages.
Opting for a carrier-neutral, colocation
data centre facility also allows local
businesses to interconnect with other
networks, including those of partners,
distributors, government entities or even
competitors for peering. This is particularly
important when considering the
emergence of new technologies in Africa,
where businesses must be agile enough to
adapt to a changing environment.
By colocating in a data centre environment
where other partners can readily provide
state-of-the-art services businesses can
gain the IT agility needed to cope with the
demands of Africa’s growing and evolving
digital economy.
When economic growth in the region
is integrated with parallel trends in
digitalisation and content consumption,
data usage and its associated storage
requirements will inevitably continue to rise.
Developing modern, state-of-the-art
local data centre infrastructure is vital to
creating a reliable operating environment
for businesses to deliver increasingly
sophisticated digital services and a key
enabler to facilitate this continued Digital
Transformation across the region. ◊
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Issue 08
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