Data centres: Critical infrastructure for Africa in the 21st Century


Starting in the mid 1990’s Africa underwent a ‘mobile revolution’ whereby from a standing start of below 1% telephone penetration (tele-density) -  the Continent now boasts over 800 million mobile phones.    By skipping the so-called ‘landline’ technologies the mobile operators leapfrogged a technology generation.  These mobile networks, it can be argued, have been a major contributor to the economic upswing the Continent has experienced since the start of the new millennium.   

The mobile revolution is now over as growth has moderated and penetration levels started to peak.    However, a new revolution beckons - the Internet revolution.  Africa falls behind the Rest of the World when it comes to broadband with less than 15% penetration, mainly in the cities.   During the last 5 years numerous submarine cables have been installed, connecting Africa to the Globe.  These fibre-optic cables are like a 10 lane highway, but with only a single bicycle riding along it.   The opportunity now, is to use this ‘ highway’ more effectively and to start filling the lanes with real traffic.   In parallel much terrestrial connectivity has been put in place with ‘fibre’ laid within many metropolitan areas as well as between them.  

The demand for data services has taken off globally with the advent of high speed mobile technologies like LTE (4G) and high-speed broadband services and we predict the same will happen in Africa.  African mobile users will start to swap out their old handsets for smartphones and their appetite for data services will grow exponentially.   This cohort will form the bulk of a massive upswing in the demand for the creation and consumption of data services, especially video. 

This data will need to be processed, stored and switched.  This data needs to reside somewhere and not on the other side of the World – be it in a data centre in North Carolina or Norway.   African Governments, regulators and customers will demand that this data be stored locally.   We thus predict a large increase in the demand for data centre services.  The Continent is hopelessly underprovided with ‘carrier neutral’ data centres;  (i.e. data centres where SME’s and large enterprises can store their servers or their data and which can connect to other data centres via the public networks.).   The situation is analogous to the paucity of telephone penetration in the early 1990’s.   Apart from countries like South Africa and Kenya there are very few that have data centres to speak of.   Those that there are, have been built by the telecommunications operators, the banks, some Governments and some multinationals, all for their own purposes. 

I contend that this is critical infrastructure for the next phase of growth of the Continent, as important, if not more so, than any roads, railways, power generation capacity and harbours that also need to be built.     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End of Passwords

Finally it seems … the penny has dropped.   Passwords are a poor substitute for real online security.   There is more and more ‘chatter’ about it.    Robin Henry writing in the Sunday Times on New Years Day talks of the end of ‘password hell’ invoking solutions in the pipeline from the Web Gods – Apple and Google.  The talk is of new biometric solutions such as facial and hand movement recognition.  Even IBM is talking this way.  ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/thestreet/2011/12/20/ibms-tech-predictions-for-the-next-5-years/ )  I agree with the notion that passwords are a dying breed but not that biometrics will become vogue.   They are fraught with problems of their own such as reliability, accuracy and the need for referencing of data-bases ( fail !) .    Why are passwords defunct?   Basically they are difficult to remember and they are easy to steal.    The solutions needed are those that require no cognitive load for the user ( the most unreliable participant in this enterprise
Read more

WIKILEAKS - the fuss?

Why all the fuss ? Why the ‘outrage’ at this ‘threat to national security’ ?   Are we really worried that nuclear war is going to break out because of these ‘dirty’ secrets getting out.  As if the North Koreans are going to up the ante any more than their mock charge of last week because of the abuse and scorn heaped upon them by US Diplomats.  ? !    Come on. To me the irony of this bluster is that it is (largely) from the right wing establishment in the US - calling it treason!     Any party that parades a half wit like Palin as a presidential hopeful hardly holds any moral high ground when it comes to protecting the USA.   Her appointment as the ‘leader of the free World’ will be enough to send any level headed American ( let alone any one of their Allies ) into a panicky tailspin at the thought of what she may stumble into ( by accident or design) . So how did these documents get out there?   Poor security.  Plain and simple.   If the US is so worried about this incident su
Read more

SPOOKS - CYBER ATTACK

Well I’ll be damned – if the subject of my last blog wasn’t the central theme to last nights episode of Spooks – CYBERWAR.    (To those who live outside the UK – Spooks is a very popular TV series about the goings on of a key team inside MI5 who spend their time thwarting terrorist attacks on the UK – while engaging in risqué amorous trysts on the side ).   And so last night we had the Russians and the Chinese –(working together !!) – ganging up on MI5 by infiltrating ( hacking ) their ‘secure’ internal network.     Whether the events portrayed were within the bounds of possibility or credibility who knows?     But if teenagers can break into the Pentagon – then I am sure that Russian/Chinese expert hackers can probably do something along the lines of infiltrating a UK Govt ‘Spooks’ departments network.      Either way it constituted an attack on British soil by foreign ‘combatants’ – which ( if it were true ) would have been a first since the Normans in 1066.   So we saw how vulner
Read more