For up to 8 months, the world has been dealing with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the IT Infrastructure, Datacentre and Telecoms sectors there will be varying concerns and challenges in operations and service levels just like in any other industry.
Suffice it to say that most Datacentre operators however have deployed fluid business continuity strategies where practises of disaster recovery, resiliency and scheduled maintenance have not flawed.
The reliance on Datacentres and Cloud services have been appreciated not only by corporate organisations where data is a primary asset but also the general populace who have realised the backbones of swift and capable internet services. Significant investments are taking place around the world by Datacentre operators to enhance capacity and facilitate growth. The emerging economy in Africa is also pulling stops to compete in the ecosystem of digital transformations by investing heavily in this industry.
In the short term, additional load on Datacentre services will be caused by increased social media use, home working, Fintech, new incubation hubs, and public service IT storage. Advanced technologies such as IoT, Big data and so on will cause another spike in Datacentre load in the medium term. So Datacentres of the future should know how to accommodate sporadic demands.
The business dynamics is quite complex within a long supply chain and vertical market. There are providers of services and consumers from any direction.
YOUR EXPERIENCE
If you are a client consuming Datacentre services, either from a view point of ‘just migrated’ to a colocation premises or cloud provider, perhaps you may have experienced challenges with your provider and you can share your experiences. You may be managing a self-contained comms room or large on-premises environment networked across a dark site or cloud providers.
Tell us of your assurances and satisfaction in your provider too.
If you are in the supplier side, you could share experiences and recommendations for both service delivery and challenges per client sectors.
Year 2020 has revealed the need for additional mobility and flexibility in Datacentre operations. The design and build of Greenfield projects will no doubt factor in both pandemic situations and other force-majeure instances.
As we endure the effects of the Covid pandemic, the recent EndSars protests in Nigeria did not make normal life easier. Going forward, it means operational practises require to be more adaptable and seamless.
With significant impacts to SLAs these factors will result in a conundrum of reshaping the supply chain right from facilities operations and maintenance, engineer’s access, spare parts flow, fuel supply and so on. Generally unit cost of services is expected to rise anyhow.
Data sovereignty issues had been an area of contention for some time and herein lies the question – remote Data accessibility cannot be compromised. So there we have it! The Datacentres of the future require a re-think.
Demand dynamics in key sectors require re-modelling. The cost of digital transformation will have to be encouraging and hopefully the current political dispensation may facilitate an easier digital transformation for SMEs.
How effective are Cloud computing services in your region?
Are Data integrity issues and business continuity a thing of the past?
Demand and Supply
Are DC services demand on per with supply?
Amongst the top 5 suppliers of co-lo, managed services, cloud and so on in your region, is collective capacity sufficient but also capable to scale up? Southern Africa is being served with a MS Azure deployment currently. Do we now need a wholesale Datacentre deployment for example MS Azure implemented in West Africa?
Skills and knowledge
Are we ready for mass roll out of DC environments and training of future DC engineers, supervisors and managers?
Data sources. The More Data , The More Datacentres
As we need more data for economic growth within this digital age of Data Analytics, IoT and Artificial Intelligence and so on, what data generation strategies and data sources must be explored other than the BFSI sector.
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