East Africa Data Centre, the only Tier 3 secure electronic data
centre in east and central Africa, has today announced a Ksh1bn
expansion to meet rack space demand that initially forced it to ration
allocations to customers. Unveiling the second and third floors of the
data centre, the East Africa Data Centre announced that the centre would
now be extended to four floors, totalling 2000 sq. m.
The data centre, which now houses Kenya’s Internet Exchange Point,
has been credited by the global Internet Society as a key factor in
driving down internet prices in Kenya, to among the lowest in Africa.
The East Africa Data Centre hosts the Points of Presence for global
carriers with international coverage, including Tata, Level3, Seacom,
and Liquid Telecom, as well as carriers owning fibre network
infrastructure, including Safaricom, JamiiTelcom, Access Kenya, Orange
Telkom Kenya Ltd, Wananchi Online, and Frontier Optical Network.
It is further playing a key role in enabling financial and corporate
organisations to hold data securely, protecting them in the event of
cyber crime and offering 24/7 secure housing for their data and
back-ups.
“The East Africa Data Centre has transformed how data traffic is
handled in the region. By providing a central point for interconnect
services, it has reduced latency, improved data services, reduced costs
and made it easier to transfer data across networks,” said Dan Kwach,
General Manager East Africa Data Centre.
“By keeping African data in Africa we continue to help reduce the
costs of internet access while creating an environment that encourages
innovation and entrepreneurial culture in the field of ICT and local
businesses,” said Mr Kwach.
Within six months of starting, it had fully sold Phase 1 of the
centre’s rack space – which houses the servers holding data – amounting
to the entire first floor. It has now opened another 500 sq m floor,
which is already 90 per cent occupied, and with the third floor already
prepped for occupancy, East Africa Data Centre unveiled plans to expand
to the fourth floor immediately, to cater for demand.
“We had to ration the rack space when we were selling the first floor
due to huge demand, until we could get the second floor built and
operational and the third floor ready to go quickly. The second floor
took roughly 8 months, but now we have the space ready, we can move much
quicker and customers can buy the amount they want,” said Mr Kwach. The
accelerated expansion in EADC’s rack space has benefitted the local
engineering and construction services sector, with all of the
contractors for the expansion sourced locally. It also comes amid
growing concern for data security. In late 2013, Kenya’s Information,
Communication and Technology Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiangi, raised
the flag on estimates that the country would lose an estimated KSh 2
billion (about US$23 million) through cyber crime, with the number of
cyber attacks detected in Kenyan cyberspace more than doubling last year
to 5.4m attacks, compared to 2.6m in 2012. Uganda, which last year
reported a surge in economic crimes, up 14.9 per cent, singled out
cybercrime, principally in mobile money and Automated Teller Machine
(ATM) fraud, as responsible for the loss of about USH1.5bn (Ksh51m),
while Bank of Tanzania (BoT) statistics indicate TZS 1.3bn (Ksh69.5) has
been stolen across the country through cyber fraud, according to the
Kenya Cyber Security Report 2014.
Financial institutions are also introducing potentially vulnerable
web and mobile applications, with a recent study that sampled 33 online
banking portals finding that only 2 of the 33 portals sampled had
adequate online security deployed on their web application. As a result,
many financial institutions are now looking into EADC to store their
data, reported the Kenya Cyber Security Report 2014.
“Banks and financial institutions are the second largest type of
occupant at the East Africa Data Centre, at about 30 per cent. With
about 43 banks in Kenya, the demand for highly secure stable
environments like ours, for use as disaster recovery, high-availability,
or primary sites, has been rising,” said Mr Kwach.
East Africa Data Centre recently signed a collaboration agreement
with Teraco Data Environments in South Africa to share synergies between
the two Data Centre Operators and improve EADC’s efficiency and
maximise on available investment opportunities.
About East Africa Data Centre
East Africa Data Centre, a carrier-neutral data centre in Nairobi, is
the largest and most sophisticated in East Africa, offering secure and
reliable space for dedicated hosting, interconnect services,
collocation, disaster recovery, network-based services, applications and
cloud services. A Tier 3 data centre, built to international standards,
it is the only purpose-built data centre in East Africa.
East Africa Data Centre is an independent company within The Liquid Telecom Group with a dedicated management team.
No comments:
Post a Comment