INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Local data
centres are
crucial in the
fight against
unemployment
With large technology
companies opening
local data centres
across South Africa, it
is time for companies
to be bold and think
globally, explains
Mpumi Nhlapo
from T-Systems
South Africa.
S
outh Africa’s sluggish economic
growth continues to be roundly
outpaced by population growth, as
business confidence remains uncertain
and job creation falters. One of the
effects is a rising unemployment level,
which according to Stats SA, has now
reached a 14-year high of 27.7%.
Amidst these downward trends, it is
easy to focus on the negatives, however,
there are still a number of ways to arrest
these worrying trends.
www.intelligentcio.com
Some encouraging news that broke
in 2017 revealed that certain large
global technology companies will
soon deliver hyper-scale cloud
services from local data centres in
South Africa. With local access to
this scale of computing power, local
organisations will be able to explore
opportunities presented by the fourth
Industrial Revolution. With latency
speeds in the milliseconds (rather
than the hundreds of milliseconds) a
world of new business opportunities
opens up. Think of augmented reality,
autonomous vehicles, real time data
analytics and machine-driven decision
making, artificial intelligence, and other
emergent technologies.
New skills for the future
This will not only accelerate the levels
of innovation and digitisation within
South African companies, but (perhaps
most importantly) it will present new
opportunities to relearn the digital world
and reskill for the future workplace.
Various trend-spotting firms, futurists and
analysts predict that a high percentage
Mpumi Nhlapo, Head of Marketing and
Portfolio Sales, T-Systems South Africa
of today’s jobs will not exist 10 to 20
years into the future. These jobs will
be replaced by new vocations such as
those listed by FastCompany: digital
death managers, 3D printing handymen,
microbial balancers, ‘urban shepherds’
and ‘corporate disorganisers’.
Most encouragingly, having local cloud
platforms will ensure that we can
retain skills in country, including data
centre management and other ICT
infrastructure skills, and grow into the likes
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