The upcoming African data centre boom

Why build Data Centres in Africa when the rest of the World is better geared for them with power and connectivity and they continue to be built at a rapid pace in these advanced markets?    On the face of it – it makes more sense to continue hosting data and services in North Carolina or in Finland if you are an Africa corporate with data hosting and storage requirements.

However things are changing in Africa.  “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi ”  to quote Pliny the Elder – There’s always something new coming out of Africa.   What now?   Well there have been a few drivers.  Firstly there is now connectivity between Africa and the rest of the World.    Numerous submarine cables provide an instantaneous connection between the various landing points and the World Wide Web (in other words the Internet.)  Secondly there is a large effort to install fiber optic capacity within and between numerous African countries driven largely by carriers like Liquid Telecom and mobile operators like MTN.  Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, there is a new development at the political level where Governments and Regulators have told those entities which deal in data – banks, health care providers and Government departments – that they need to ensure their primary data is stored locally.   The intrusion by the NSA and related agencies into databases hosted in the US or Europe has given African Governments pause.  The realization that their data is not secure has driven this new legislation which by the way is also being implemented in other jurisdictions like Germany Germanys data laws  and Russia.   (Russian data laws)

What this means is that the current capacity of African data centres is well below that which the enforcement of these new laws will require.    Hence we envisage a new data centre building boom in Africa starting now.    The most likely model will be a carrier neutral data centre which will allow for all comers to host their data (as opposed to proprietary DC’s for banks and large corporates own requirements).  They will be modular allowing for expansion and optimizing capital investment. 

In addition we have seen that the demand from prospective customers is for Cloud services (as opposed to collocation).  This is mainly Platform as a Service both dedicated ie Bare Metal Servers or shared (leveraged) along the lines of AWS.   So the trend is not only to migrate out of ones own data centre but then to move away from any infrastructure investment.   Customers don’t even want to own their own servers and collocate – they want virtual servers which they can then use on a pay as you go basis.  True utility computing.

The manifold benefits include:  
  • protection from technological redundancy;  
  • no capital expenditure ( freeing up the balance sheet);  
  • heightened security (Cloud DC’s are much easier to secure than in –house DC’s); 
  • reduced headcount (much fewer IT staff) and 
  • easier compliance.   
Build them and they will come?   

The customers are there already!!


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