Data centres to become vital cog in wheel of business

Driven by innovation and evolution, the data centre will become a more vital cog in way companies do business in the coming years, says LEX VAN WYK.

In the run-up to 2020, the data centre is due to become a more vital cog in the wheel of business than ever before, driven by innovation and evolution, according to Teraco Data Environments, which opened doors six years ago as sub-Saharan Africa’s first provider of vendor-neutral data environments.

Teraco has been fortunate to play a part in the data centre evolution, says CEO Lex van Wyk.

Identifying the gap and taking market share is not always easy, but six years in and 3 multi-data centre facilities nationwide, Teraco has established itself as a data centre of choice.

Van Wyk says Teraco is the only data centre with access to all undersea cables, along with having access to most African fibre networks: “Through NAPAfrica, Teraco’s open peering and Africa’s biggest Internet Exchange, we house five of the largest global content players and estimate that 50% of content across the continent is accessed via NAPAfrica, making Teraco the most connected, neutral environment in Africa.

The advent of the cloud, says van Wyk, is driving the growth and further significance of data centres.

There is a definite move towards using a specialised cloud resource rather than duplicating infrastructure resource evidence of which lies in Gartner’s predicted growth of $107 billion between 2013 and 2017. We especially see this in the enterprise, where organisations are driving towards Layer 3 IT strategies and making a decisive move away from Capex to Opex, which is essentially a pay-per-use model.

Data centre as a Service (DCaaS), is also a reality, according to van Wyk: “Colocating is the first step towards DCaaS. With over 180 clients, Teraco has already made significant inroads into this space and it will continue to grow. Our ability to white label services between cloud providers is a major plus for Teraco and its service providers, making all pay-per-use options easier to initiate, manage and market.

Teraco has also achieved a full ISO 9001 quality certification with no exclusions, as well as Payment Card Industry Data Security standard (PCI DSS). Both certifications cover all three of Teraco’s operational data centres in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. These aspects are critically important for meeting POPI requirements.

Van Wyk says other factors influencing the growth of cloud and as a consequence, data centres are big data, thin client devices, and mobility.

“These technologies are completely reliant on access to diverse connectivity products. The widest choice of carriers and connectivity aggregates in a vendor neutral environment”.

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