Balancing Act releases Africa data centre report

With the arrival of several international cables on both sides of the continent, the stage has been set for the growth of Africa's data centre market. Data centres are a key ingredient of the nascent telecoms and IT infrastructure in Africa. Their facilities enable safe storage, back-up and fast transmission of vast amounts of data locally.

Proising outlook

In 2011, the outlook for the growing data centre market in Africa is very promising, with various degrees of roll-out and the steady build-up of services associated with them. In some parts of Africa such as in South African, the data centre market is booming in anticipation of the new bandwidth that will be supplied by the new WACS cable later this year, but several regions remain untapped although local corporate demand is growing.

The report assesses the "shared" data centre landscape by country and by facility type. Altogether, the report highlights 108 "shared" data centre facilities in 11 African countries.

The report also answers the question of "where to build new data centres in Africa," by reviewing ideal data centre locations, their economic and political status, available power grid and access to bandwidth from an investors' perspective.

This includes analysis for each selected country with relevant market segmentation, locations' strengths and weaknesses, key builds and major new planned builds in 2011.

Pricing and contact directory

A chapter dedicated to pricing and another one focused on market drivers bring extra ammunitions to potential investors.

The research also provides an African data centre contact directory, a directory of companies engaged in selling services into the African data centre sector and 66 tables with detailed market indicators.

It closes with recommendations for both data centre builders, government agencies and service providers, as well as with trends' forecasts in the years to come.

For more information, go to balancingact-africa.com.