actively being addressed, but it will likely remain a challenge
for the foreseeable future.
Regardless of the issues described above, the data
surge the continent has been experiencing for some time
is now clearly fuelling an African data centre boom. New
professionally built and maintained facilities are needed
across the continent as a matter of urgency, and this is
providing opportunities not only for the traditional players in
the ICT world, but also for entrepreneurs looking to establish
entirely new service opportunities with dedicated colocation
and data hosting facilities. The question is where these new
facilities are going to come from?
The answer is prefabrication
The clear answer to addressing Africa’s immediate need
for more data centres is prefabrication. Prefabricated data
centres are built off-site in clean room factories where they’re
also pre-equipped and fully tested before being deployed and
commissioned in the country. In this way, construction costs
and timescales can be managed with far greater accuracy,
and the data centres are built by a team of professionals
highly experienced in delivering Tier-certified facilities – all of
which contribute to significantly reducing project risk.
Traditionally inherent inflexibility of constructed buildings
means that they’re typically built over-sized in the hope that
the business will ultimately fill it – an extremely inefficient use
of capital. By contrast, the modular nature of prefabricated
facilities allows capex to be more accurately managed during
the initial build phase, and to be tightly kept in line with the
growth of the business over time. So future expansion can be
undertaken exactly when the business needs greater capacity
and without interrupting ongoing data centre operations.
As a result, as they expand prefabricated facilities can also
take advantage of new technologies that may not have been
available during the first phase of the project.
Critically, given Africa’s immediate need for new data
centres, a prefabricated approach will always deliver fully
commissioned facilities in a fraction of the time it would take
to build a traditional brick and mortar one. And that means
faster service improvements for service users and faster time
to revenue for service providers. It’s clear that Africa needs
a lot of new data centres, and fast. The good news is that
prefabricated facilities are clearly the right solution for Africa’s
short, medium and long term data centre needs. n
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