Data centre geared to SMEs

SME focused ISP, ARC Telecoms, has extended its enterprise offerings for small businesses by adding colocation in Teraco’s vendor neutral data centre in Isando.

Customers can now place their servers in ARC’s cabinets and benefit from the vendor neutrality, guaranteed uptime and world-class facilities at Teraco. The benefits of colocation over self-provisioning include reduced cross connect fees, complete protection from power outages, increased security and redundancy as well as retained control and ownership of the data by the client.

Businesses colocating in Teraco will also benefit from having quick and easy access to all significant networks and carriers in South Africa. This allows for reduced interconnect fees, having the freedom to select the best access provider and an easy connection with any of the other clients housed in the data centre.

The benefits of hosting servers within ARC’s cabinets include complete protection for your businesses hardware, software and data. ‚There are many SMEs that host their own servers on their premises. These are often not sufficiently maintained, backed up or protected against theft, damage and power outages or surges. Colocation is perfect for customers that are looking to host their servers in a secure, redundant environment but don’t have the capital or the need to build a data centre for themselves. Through Teraco, ARC can offer the SME affordable, accessible and vendor neutral storage space,‚ says Steve Briggs, ARC Telecoms CEO.

The colocation market is focused on customers that specifically require hosting for their own hardware because of the applications they run or for fear of placing confidential company data in the hands of a third party. ‚According to BMI’s research less than half of South African SMEs are using any form of outsourced hosting service which suggests to us that they definitely fall into the colocation market,‚ says Briggs.

‚This partnership is important for the SME market as it gives the smaller guys a way to have their ‚own’ data centre without having to fork out on infrastructure. This model offers SMEs a route to place their servers in our vendor neutral facilities as they can purchase space in smaller quantities than if they partnered with Teraco directly,‚ says Lex van Wyk, MD of Teraco Data Environment.

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