Challenges in data centre deployment in Africa
Building data centres in Africa is increasingly starting to grab the industry’s attention. What are the key issues that are influencing the growth of data centre’s in Africa? The data centre industry continues to thrive globally and the big players are still seeing strong growth in mature markets and hence they have little incentive to start looking at smaller data centre’s in what is still perceived to be a high-risk market. The players who are getting into Africa are going to be ‘specialists’ who see the niche and want to get a foothold early. Not that there is going to be a shortage of opportunity as the installed base in Africa is still miniscule. The quality and nature of that installed base is variable with very few Tier 3 let alone Tier 4 data centre’s and many are in-house telco data centre’s. Carrier neutral colocation data centre’s are few and far between. There-in lies the opportunity. There is more than sufficient submarine capacity and the