Tuesday 7 August 2018

Trends in Cloud, Colocation & Peering in Africa

Trends in Cloud, Colocation & Peering in Africa

*Research firms have made predictions that the global colocation market will grow to more than US$50 billion by 2020, a CAGR of over 12% from 2015 to 2020. A significant portion of this demand is being driven by the enterprise, IT and telecommunications sectors.

The key trends we forecast will affect the colocation market in Africa - and in some cases globally:

• Content is moving closer to the edge
**2017 Research reports state that content providers such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix are seeking ways to more deeply connect with end users in order to improve overall user experience. They are spreading out to achieve global coverage, and instead of placing physical servers in various locations throughout the world, these providers are using an edge computing network to push data, applications and services to devices at the edge of networks in order to lower transmission costs, reduce latency and improve the user experience. Many have entered the African market at key interconnection hubs where the infrastructure is well established and robust.

• Cloud & direct connect are essential
Enterprises in Africa have in the last 18 months started accelerating their adoption of cloud and are now actively seeking migration opportunities. Many are already using public clouds for data storage. These enterprises are also requiring direct connections (versus connecting through public networks) to the Cloud for improved performance and security. Direct connect to the cloud is now one of a carrier's / colocation provider’s most valuable offerings.
  
• Access to diverse networks & peering
***Vendor neutral colocation offers a wide choice of interconnection options to many networks. The value of a colocation provider’s network density, however, can be evaluated by two things: the total number of carriers present in the data centre, and the amount of traffic exchanged. But while carrier connections are significant, peering is the essential component. 

• The Rise of the Digital Edge
As technologies like Cloud disrupt the ICT landscape and force the CIO to take a view on the digitisation of the enterprise, the relevance of protecting that strategy by: de-risking the ownership of data centres, building flexibility around data centre technology, bedding down security and developing an interconnected architecture, become more relevant than ever. 

references:
* Allied Market Research 2016, Markets & Markets 2016, Xalam Analytics 2015
** TeleGeography 2017
*** Teraco Data Environments 2017

Monday 23 January 2017

African growth will rely on infrastructure sharing


Since the mid 2000’s ICT organisations have been discussing the importance and the determinant role of infrastructure sharing in the development of ICT markets in Africa. Unfortunately it has not been enough and while it led to many organisations working on the concept, reality is that the open access approach has not been fully embraced, nor is it completely understood.

“The reality is that shared infrastructure is a significant enabling mechanism to stimulate broadband access in South Africa. If sub-Saharan Africa wants to ensure its competitiveness, we need to be decisive and have a clear-cut plan to fully embrace and utilise an open access approach.”

Open access is a disruptor, and one that will ultimately lead to better business and value for end users. Open access and a shared infrastructure approach is one of the most progressive ways for Africa to grow.

Teraco has reached the perfect point of maturity where the market is ready to embrace open access. Having grown its client base to over 300, there is now a proliferation of service providers and all these clients can utilise the ecosystems within Teraco. Everyone is connected and it’s all through an open access model. This is very important for transformation for the economy and for the continent.

A platform for growth                 

Through an open access model companies can also deploy technologies quicker. Sharing can give companies greater leverage and a more efficient and rapid deployment of newer technologies. The cost savings to be made from infrastructure sharing also enables companies to reallocate their competencies and capital on the development of their core business. This is especially the key to success in a competitive and cost conscious market.

The biggest factor in Teraco’s favour is also its key differentiator – the fact that Teraco offers a vendor-neutral and technology-independent environment.  It is also something that is critical to its success. The cloud is a key driver in the current trend towards outsourcing as the modern CIO seeks a total solution and migration path. In order to ease the migration pain, CIOs tend to look for a one-stop shop provider, but this, inevitably, runs the risk of vendor lock-in.

Teraco is able to solve these challenges in stages for the CIO. The initial move to the data centre environment will ensure that efficiencies are gained, after which the next stage sees its Africa Cloud eXchange connecting the CIO with other parties that will help the company migrate into the cloud as he sees fit. In effect, Teraco offers an ecosystem that will enable the CIO to obtain advice and even proof of concept offerings from other Teraco customers. This ecosystem is another key differentiator.

Offering strategic benefits, the Teraco ecosystem delivers industry-specific assistance. This is because as businesses of a certain type move into the Teraco data centre, a core ecosystem develops around them as they encourage customers or suppliers of theirs to also join the data centre.

“Teraco effectively only sells one thing, which is its data centre environment. However, the stickiness of the benefits that comes with this, encompassing everything from improved latency and connectivity to cost-efficiencies and managed services, coupled with its neutrality and this growing ecosystem is what continues to make Teraco a service provider of choice.” 

Connecting Africa

Interconnection and peering - secret to success

There is an estimated ten million square metres of data centre space around the world and this is expected to increase by 40 percent within the next two years. It’s obvious that data centre outsourcing is not just thriving, but growing exponentially.

“Data centre owners have realised that they need to move towards an outsourced option,” .

It is widely understood that every single data centre provider must offer generators and the ubiquitous uninterruptable power supply (UPS). So while power failures are driving more enterprises to outsource their data centres, that is not what is sending them to Teraco. To understand why clients come to Teraco, you need look no further than the ‘open’ philosophy, which limits the cost of interconnection and enables peering and fosters co-operation between companies that would otherwise never have considered working together.

Teraco is a vendor-neutral operator; it has no vested interest in getting customers to use its network. Instead, the company has all the major local and international operators as well as the various undersea cables coming through its data centre.

This means Teraco focuses on saving the customers money and helping them to make money. They do this by making interconnection as cost-effective as possible.

So if a customer decides to move from one telco to another, it’s as simple as unplugging the cable from the old service provider and plugging it into the new one.

In 2012, NAPAfrica was launched.  It is a nonprofit organisation fully funded by Teraco with the goal of bringing content into Africa. It’s designed to overcome the long-haul connections and resultant high latencies of the past, by bringing international content vendors closer to the local market.

NAPAfrica is designed to cut out the middleman by taking the client directly from the network provider to the content provider. This improves both resilience and latency by allowing customers to access content via a local exchange.

The next step is to open up the Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations to the world. NAPAfrica is designed not only to reduce costs locally, but across the entire Sub-Saharan region, enabling these markets to access international content at prices that are no longer exorbitant.

Many of the landlocked African nations have also struggled with the political and regulatory challenges around crossing borders. Thanks to the fact that some of the large carrier clients have cross-border licences, these countries can now access NAPAfrica immediately, which will no doubt have a massive impact on the businesses in these countries. They are now finally getting their chance to truly join the global community.

Building Africa’s biggest data centre

Many local enterprises are not investing in building new data centres. There has been a distinct shift towards handing the data centre environment over to experts and letting them take care of business, like the demand for 99.999 percent uptime. Teraco will double the size of the existing facilities by the end of the year. The new data centre will offer 5 000m2 of new operational space and will provide 10mVA of continuous power. Completion of this new phase will mean that Teraco has a total infrastructure footprint of some 30 000m2, of which 10 000m2 will be operational space. In addition, the total power supplied will be in the region of 16mVA, which is the equivalent of the energy needs of 30 000 households. The new facility will provide current and future operational space at a total ten-year investment of around R1 billion.

“Teraco has a total infrastructure footprint of some 30 000m2.”

With global outsourcing really beginning to take off, Teraco is ideally positioned to capitalise on this trend. In fact, certain issues specific to the South African market are driving customers to the company at an even more rapid rate than in other parts of the world. Thanks to peering, Teraco’s customers have become significant enough to make the large international content players interested in dealing with them as a community.

Teraco’s mission is to break down barriers and foster co-operation between companies that would otherwise never have considered working together. Teraco provides the platform for true strength in numbers.


The world connects here.

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Teraco broadens African horizons through link to major European Internet exchange AMS-IX

NAPAfrica an open and free peering exchange within Teraco’s colocation facilities, is now connected with the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX). AMS-IX interconnects over 550 IP networks, making it the world’s leading Internet hub. 

The direct link to Teraco’s peering service NAPAfrica, which is effective from March 2013, brings Africa substantially closer to Europe in terms of connectivity, and ultimately offers endless opportunities for European carriers to connect across Africa. African Internet Service Providers (ISPs) now have the opportunity to tap further into global carrier networks through peering at NAPAfrica, thereby offering African consumers access to high speed connections at a dramatically reduced cost as well as rich global content from international carriers. 

With the initial introduction of route servers at Teraco by NAPAfrica early in 2012 there has been a subsequent overall reduction in ISP operating costs in the South African market through the simplification of the peering process. Route servers lower the barrier to entry for African ISPs that do not necessarily have the resources or hardware to manage multiple connections to numerous peers. There are more than 60 peers live at NAPAfrica with access to over 21 local and international carriers. 

NAPAfrica offers the choice of both multi-lateral and bi-lateral peering which then allows all members to connect to the exchange based on what is preferable to their business.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Data centres in the Cloud Era

Global cloud experts believe the industry is entering an era of massive cloud enabled data centres run by third-party organisations – including immense, virtualised structures operated by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google – capable of optimising costs and maximising service availability for clients.

It is a concept that has resonated with South African carriers and network operators who have welcomed the idea of a neutral environment – where traditional business rivals can interconnect their networks. In the telco space, Telkom has been quick to endorse the concept, on the back of vendor neutrality's acceptance and growth around the world.

For data centre managers, the advantages of vendor neutrality are found in the benefits of being able to select service providers strategically in order to reduce costs, while being able to connect to vendors quickly and easily.

For enterprise clients the advantages can be found in the resulting ecosystem where multiple service providers aggregate and offer a diverse range of services that are only a simple interconnect away.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

A conflict free environment, an open market and choice

…the true value of a vendor neutral data centre

The vendor neutral data centre focuses its efforts on the management and maintenance of the facility and limits its activities to a fixed set of value layers in order to avoid conflicts of interest with upstream service providers. These include carriers, network providers, ISPs, cloud services providers, content providers, data storage providers, disaster recovery specialists and many others.

This model creates an ‘open market’ and a community into which clients within the data centre can add value.

Vendor neutral data centre providers concentrate their effort on the "basic" layers in the range of services provided to data centre clients: space, physical security, power, environment management and monitoring, fire protection and interconnects.

A key benefit of the vendor neutral model is freedom of choice. Essentially, a vendor neutral environment allows the client to connect to any ISP and route traffic between any network service providers (NSPs) via public peering. The NSPs could include local and international carriers, application service providers and other content providers.


Next week’s blog will look at the role of the vendor neutral data centre in the era of ‘the cloud’.

Sunday 17 June 2012

The colocation value proposition


COLOCATION …provides secure, cost-effective data centre infrastructure for your business-critical IT and hosting infrastructures. 


WHY CHOOSE COLOCATION?
  •      A practical balance between cost and security
  •      High availability infrastructure
  •      Carrier diversity
  •      Low cost interconnects
  •      Round the clock access to an experienced support team
 
HOW COLOCATION SERVICES WORK: A data centre is one of the most critical elements of your IT infrastructure. However, such a complex facility can be extremely costly to build, operate and maintain. Colocation at a vendor neutral data centres will save you considerable cost, time and resources, and brings you the benefit of advanced infrastructure and the widest choice of connectivity available.

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS 
  • Reduces costs and complexity
  • Maximises ROI
  • Reliable, dependable and secure:
  • Resilient power and cooling systems
  • Premium-grade physical security
    Range of services providing new technologies and competitive business advantage:
  • Choose only the services you need – cabinets, power, remote management, open colocation, secure dedicated caged spac
  • Flexible scalability