Will SEACOM help SA close online data centre gap?

Local Internet service provider, RSAWEB, has announced a set of virtual data centre solutions targeted at South African companies that aim to take full advantage of SEACOM’s 15 000km fibre-optic undersea cable when addressing data growth and storage. The company believes the cable will help close the gap in South Africa’s data centre services.
When the new SEACOM undersea cable links southern and East Africa, Europe and South Asia, the sheer level of connectivity that will result from this deployment addresses several gaps in the online arena that local companies have experienced in the past.

This is according to Rob Gilmour, managing director of RSAWEB, who says that costs and inconsistent connectivity issues have taken second place to the value that managed hosting and virtualisation bring to organisations.

“Blue chip companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google are trusting and investing in virtual data centres and virtualisation to address their growing storage requirements and this, coupled with the fact that the costs associated with hosting your data virtually are consistently reducing, compels us to believe that virtualisation is the way forward for South African companies as well.
“Web hosting has never been more affordable and rich media, social networking and e-commerce is making the online space a very dynamic and lucrative one. The challenge now lies with designing a wide array of solutions to suit the varying requirements of local organisations,” he says.

Gilmour says the decision to invest in managed hosting or virtualisation solutions is driven by cost savings, simplified hosting operations and improved uptime and availability. This approach, he says, is not only more affordable when considering initial capital outlay and maintenance costs, but also when the productivity gains among internal staffers are recorded.

“Many companies cannot afford to employ full time staff members to manage internal data centres. Leaving data and storage management tasks in the hands of an external third party frees IT staff from the mundane hosting-related tasks like handling technology and security upgrades, server monitoring, reporting, backups and load balancing, allowing them to focus on infrastructure support and application development.

“RSAWEB’s solutions in this space are optimised for any business that requires high levels of reliability and availability, performance and security in a package that is easy to purchase and get started with,” says Gilmour. “Our hosting packages offer a broad spectrum of applications including Web, database and application hosting.”
RSAWEB has released customisable solutions that include: