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Pandemic drives new focus on carrier neutral data centres

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2021
Stephane Duproz, CEO, Africa Data Centres.
Stephane Duproz, CEO, Africa Data Centres.

The pandemic and its impact on working models and economies has driven a renewed appreciation of how crucial IT is to business continuity, and a surge of interest in carrier- and cloud-neutral data centres. 

This is according to Stephane Duproz, CEO of Africa Data Centres, who was speaking ahead of a webinar to be hosted by Africa Data Centres in partnership with ITWeb this month.

“One of the biggest changes over the past year has been that stakeholders are no longer centralised – workforces, suppliers and customers are all at home, which means that the IT architectures have had to be distributed rather than centralised. At the same time the quality of the connectivity is becoming more important,” he says.

“In the past, when stakeholders were all at the headquarters, the centralised infrastructure supported fast access to applications, communications and collaboration. This is not the case anymore, forcing organisations to focus on how they should adapt to this more distributed model in which connectivity is outside of their control. With stakeholders using various networks, you need to optimise access to systems and consider various sources of connectivity. The best location is a carrier-neutral data centre such as our facilities.”

Duproz says the pandemic has also increased awareness of the importance of IT for business. 

The best location is a carrier-neutral data centre.

Stephane Duproz, Africa Data Centres.

“Before the pandemic, CIOs were perfectly conscious of that, but now the full C-suite realises that IT has been at the centre of the reorganisation of workplaces facing the pandemic. They have realised that IT tools are critical for their businesses, so this has led organisations to reassess the level of performance and security of those tools within their organisations, and a focus on further developing those tools.”

While organisations look to further enhance their IT infrastructures and digitally transform, many are also feeling the economic impacts brought on by the pandemic. This is leading them to reconsider in-house infrastructure and data centres, he says.

“Organisations are asking why they would continue to pay so many staff members and the costs of running a data centre, when it is cheaper to benefit from our economies of scale and outsource maintenance to the experts,” he says.

Africa Data Centres will host a webinar on 23 June, on the current state and future of data centres in Africa, as part of the ITWeb Cloud and Data Centre Webinar Series

This event will address the different data centre models and services available to African businesses, their different roles in facilitating innovation in the continent, and how the huge data centre infrastructure investments and developments in South Africa will translate to economic growth. 

 For more information, and to register, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/africa-data-centres-the-current-state-and-the-future-of-Dat-Centres-in-Africa/

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