DATA CENTRES
Accelerating the Online Shift The global digital evolution has just been put into overdrive by Covid-19 as locked-down nations are forced to accelerate the shift online, driving a massive spike in data needs. Microsoft Teams has reached 44 million daily users and Zoom users exploded to 200 million in March from a 10 million previous maximum.
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atthew Renshaw, Chief Operating Officer of pan-African construction solutions company Profica, says that as businesses and even entire economies play rapid catch-up, the current pandemic challenge is throwing the need for local infrastructure to provide rapid, high-availability data centre services in Africa into sharp relief. “Countries across the African continent now have to leapfrog when it comes to evolving technologies and we will continue to see rapid growth in data-hungry new technologies, including the accelerated roll-out of Broadband, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, 5G and the Internet of Things,” says Matthew.
Consulting, site selection, development and project management, technology workload migration, and disposition of facilities “As businesses continue to harness new technologies, they need to have the right supporting infrastructure in place. The ability to rapidly adapt and implement, as well as operate and secure business-critical data enables businesses to survive shocks to the economy, with the data centre at the core.” Profica has geared up with specialist partners, CBRE and their Data Centres team based in Europe, to increase expert project delivery services for data centres in Africa. Profica’s senior managers have
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THE SOUTH AFRICAN MECHANICAL ENGINEER
Matthew Renshaw, Chief Operating Officer of Profica
experience in delivering ICT and data centre projects for major brands including Vodacom, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Ericsson and Google. “Even before Covid-19, data centres had been identified as the next real growth opportunity across our continent. They are a critical part of the infrastructure required to grow knowledge economies. Setting up robust, future-proof infrastructure requires specialist expertise from the outset and we are well positioned to deliver across Africa,” Matthew adds.
Untapped markets
“Even with economic growth severely constrained, several data centres have already been constructed, which should continue in key regional hubs.” The demand for cloud services will drive further data centre expansion across Africa, with spending predicted to grow to R11.53 billion in 2022 in the view of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in South Africa. According to Jan Hnizdo, MD of Teraco, South Africa leads the continent with 59 data centres, followed by Nigeria and Kenya with 10 each.
VOL 70 May/June 2020
