Demand for data backup opens windows for IT firms
The arrival of undersea fibre optic cables in the country has sparked new investment in data recovery and storage, taking advantage of the growing telecoms industry appetite in the East African region.
Construction of data centres is all the fashion. Rwanda was the first to announce the awarding of a contract to a Swedish company to establish a national data centre where all national information will be stored and to also provide backup for other countries in the region.
In May, the Rwanda Development Board signed a contract with Swedish information and communication technology firm Coromaticto build the national data centre at a cost of more than $5 million.
The centre will store data for ministries and public and private institutions. Installation work was expected to end this month. The centre’s facilities will be available to neighbouring countries wishing to back their data up on the Rwandan system.
On December 2, Kenya’s position in the region received a major boost after a plan to build a Sh600 million state-of-the-art eco-friendly data centre to serve East and Central Africa was unveiled.
ICT firm Kenya Data Networks (KDN) is building the centre which will relieve the region from having to seek back-up services in Europe and America.
Powered by solar energy, the data centre, which will be housed at Sameer Businesss Park, will serve Kenya and other African countries seeking to safeguard essential data in a secure environment.
According to KDN, technology employed in building the centre will ensure the structure can withstand even a bomb attack. The centre will be classified at security level seven, which is the highest in the world and similar to that used by United Nations and top intelligence agencies across the world.
Gas emissions
“The data centre will cut gas emissions and energy use through an improved architectural design which will use the latest solar power technology to provide the energy requirements of the facility,” said KDN board chairman Naushad Merali.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the ICT sector are forecast to increase from 2 per cent in 2009 to 6 per cent by 2020 as a proportion of global total emissions, according to research carried out by Fujitsu, a global IT company.
KDN chief executive Kai Wolf said the centre is designed for disaster recovery, host mission-critical computer systems with fully redundant systems, and compartmentalised security zones.
Many companies spend between 2 to 4 per cent of their budgets on disaster recovery planning. “Completion of the data storage facility will, therefore, save the companies from damage resulting from interruptions of their infrastructure and data,” said Mr Wolf.
“This will bring considerable savings, the opportunity to increase data centre capacity in a more flexible and rapid way as demand increases, as well as substantial energy efficiency and sustainability,” he said.
Construction of the facility is in line with the overall plan by the government to establish a national neutral data centre to safeguard corporate data and integrate it with various government agencies.
KDN was among 28 firms that had expressed interest in setting up such a centre in conjunction with the Ministry of Information and Communications under a public private partnership arrangement.
Other firms were Safaricom, Telkom Kenya, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Tata International, Wananchi Group, Next Technologies, Simba Technology, Open Worlds, Seven Seas and TeleStart.
The centre is expected to provide multiple services including disaster recovery, housing of national and international exchanges, teleport facilities and ‘meet me rooms’.
The firm will carry out pre-development planning, construction and setting up infrastructure, maintenance and management of civil, electrical, security and safety related works as well as acquisition of technology solutions and expertise and overall management of the implementation process.
Growing potential in the industry also motivated South African cellular communications group Vodacom early in the year to announce that it was going to set up two new data centres; one in Nigeria and another in East Africa, probably in Tanzania, as it seeks to cement its presence in business data services on the continent.
According to the firm, the two new facilities will complement Vodacom’s 1,300 square-metre data centre in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. The Midrand centre was on plan for an expansion to 5,000 square metres.
The two projected centres will initially have a capacity of 500 square metres each, to be expanded to 1,000 square metres over time.
The three data centres will all eventually be connected via undersea cables - the West African Cable System (Wacs) and Sat-3 to Nigeria, and the East African Submarine System (Eassy) and Seacom to East Africa.
Set up shop
Early in the year, the International Consortium for Organisational Resilience, an IT examiner based in the US, set up shop in Kenya in partnership with a local software firm, Openworld Ltd, in an effort to train professionals who can set up and operate data centres.
The East African region is hampered by a lack of facilities that meet international standards and professionals to man them.
As many firms continue to embrace information technology, demand for safer storage facilities for electronic data is on the rise.
But corporate East Africa is facing the challenge of accessing backup storage facilities that meet the required international standards.
As a result, firms like banks, mobile telephony firms and insurance companies that store sensitive information have opted to rely on date centres in South Africa, Europe and the United States.
