Data centre on the rise in Africa but growth is uneven

In an article posted on Biz Tech Africa, TLC (Tariff Consultancy ltd; a company that specialises in data centre pricing said Nigeria and South Africa account for about 60% of the total data centre space on the African continent.

TCL forecasts that Data Centre space will amount to 107,000 square metres in Africa as of the beginning of 2015, and is forecast to grow by 7 per cent per annum over the 5 year period from 2015 to 2020.

This cannot be far from the truth as these two nations account for over 230 million citizens of the over 1 billion people on the continent. Lagos was recently placed number 19 among the affordable and entrepreneurial cities in the world in a Times magazine publication. A Financial Times article also placed Lagos, Johannesburg among other cities as cities in Africa where venture capitalists should consider focusing on as innovation is on the increase.

TLC also discovers that new Carrier Neutral Data Centre space is being created for the first time since 2012 – with new high specification facilities introduced in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria & Tunisia, with higher pricing and high density applications.

The report went further to say carrier (Telco) based data centre facilities account for nearly half of ll raised floor space in Africa while carrier neutral data centre operators have seen a significant growth as well since 2012.

As local development of applications continues to increase, Africans need reliable and affordable data centres to power launch their applications. Currently, a majority of developers across the African continent host and store data on overseas servers.