Invest in more centres to ensure data security

The data centre market in Africa is expected to top $3bn (R52.8bn)by 2025, and the pressure is mounting to reduce carbon emissions around the globe.

The question is: Can we build net zero data centres on the continent of Africa?

The acceleration of technologies — cloud, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence (AI) — are increasing the demand for data centres as part of the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

For Africa to meet the growing demand, the continent needs 1000MW — equivalent to 700 facilities.

This is despite recent investments in data infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa and with much of the continent’s capacity remaining in SA.

We can’t shy away from the fact that data centres are power hungry.

According to tech research and consulting firm Gartner, about 10% of data centre operating expenditure is consumed by power costs.

Gartner further highlights that “over and above the critical importance of a stable power supply, responsible corporate citizenship and meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices combine to put significant pressure on data centre owners to service the continent and ensure that Africa can keep pace with the rest of the world.”

The industry has introduced the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as a standard for measuring how efficiently data centres use energy.

The likes of Africa Data Centres, headed by recently appointed CEO Tesh Durvasula, are working towards providing proper infrastructure in helping companies achieving their digital goals.

Africa Data Centres’ new Cape Town facility is set to create a wide range of jobs through the provision of digital services, and the hiring of local contractors and workers for the builds right up to hightech level.

A report by market research company Arizton highlighted that SA is the leading colocation data centre base in Africa, with high cloud-based service adoption, an increased enterprise digitalisation drive and migration from onpremises facilities expected to drive the country’s data centre market.

According to the report, Johannesburg is SA’s leading data centre market.

In 2020, the major data centre investors here were Teraco Data Environments, Africa Data Centre and NTT Global Data Centres.

If we look at Teraco Data Environments, its JB1 and JB3 facilities in SA have added space of more than 3,994m².

The report by Arizton further highlighted that several data centre companies had taken the initiative to install renewable energy sources. In 2021, internet penetration in SA stood at 65%, and the number of internet users increased by 4.5% between January 2020 and January last year.

In January last year, it was estimated the number of social media users in the country was about 25 million.

Internet penetration is aiding the growth of data centre development in SA.

Enterprises and governments in Africa are seeing a huge rise in data centre needs for storage, app development, hybrid working needs and online customer platforms.

Investments in data centres translates into producing skilled personnel to meet the requirement and needs of running smart data centres.