climate and comms

The African data centre market consists primarily of in-house data centres built by banks, Telco’s and Governments for their own use.   This has been a function of the lack of availability of carrier neutral data centres.   However this is changing with the advent of companies like Teraco which are building World Class Tier 3 + data centres which use the latest technologies for managing power and cooling.   The power and cooling requirements of new technology servers and high density suites is leading to many legacy data centre facilities being unable to deliver the energy efficiency benefits of a new purpose-built facilities.    The operating costs of older data centres are thus becoming increasingly prohibitive with the life time cost of power exceeding the cost of building a new data centre. The increased requirement for digital and physical security has lead corporations to seek better and ultimately cheaper solutions by going outs...

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-opti...

FIDO or Fast Identity Online was launched last week by a couple of Internet big hitters most notably PayPal.   They clearly have a vested interest in ensuring that their transactions are secure.     FIDO aims to provide specifications or standards to the industry that embody  an approach to authentication which starts to move away from the ‘security by obscurity ‘  or user name/password paradigm prevalent today.   The main reason why the incidence of hacking is sky-rocketing.   [ Twitter Hacked ] FIDO aims to leverage hardware devices such as phones and tablets as well as fingerprint readers, webcams, TPM ( Trusted Platform Module)  chips and tokens into an open-standard whereby there will be inter-operability between different systems but which comply to the standard.   A client/server architecture in combination with some hardware fingerprint starts to approach a much more secure approach th...

Picture the scene.   You are a SAAS provider.  Your products works for SME’s as well as large corporates.   You know you will need to sell through the channel to get to the larger enterprises.   You engage with the ones who have the best profile for your offering.    You have a great first round – they love your stuff – they say “ we want to sell your service .”    But first…………. we have a few questions.   Now you roll back the clock.   Sigh.   You are in a time warp as you read the questions :  • Where is [ product/service  name]  hosted ?  • Please give us Network, Application and Security Architecture diagrams • What is the models for enterprise clients to sign up?.  • What toolkits are available?  • How will we be able to assist our clients with implementation ?  • How do we monitor and support our clients ?  • Is your product IP protected? • Please provide reference...