Organisations around the world are trying to manage an explosion of data across distributed sites and environments, requiring them to be more agile and responsive than ever before, but often by means of legacy infrastructure. This scenario is no different for businesses in West Africa.

So said Gbenga Adebowale, Enterprise Sales Director for Central Africa at Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions. Speaking at the West African leg of a series of ‘Accelerate’ events run by Vertiv, Adebowale clarified to attending Nigerian and Ghanian organisations that local businesses not only face similar challenges as their global counterparts but must also contend with unstable power and the rising costs of doing business, further complicating efforts to integrate, monitor and manage data faster and more efficiently. 

“Part of the answer lies in harnessing the power of intelligent infrastructure, which assists in overcoming complexity, improving efficiencies, and accelerating data management,” he added.

Global survey: African data centre landscape reflects global issues 

Eben Owen, Senior Business Director, Anglophone Africa, Uptime Institute, a guest speaker at the Nigerian Accelerate event, corroborated Adebowale‘s statements, backing this with results from the Uptime Institute's 14th Annual ‘Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey’, which is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of its kind. 

The survey collected responses from more than 850 data centre owners and operators, including those responsible for managing infrastructure at the world’s largest IT organisations, as well as nearly 700 vendors and consultants. Almost 10 percent of the respondents were from Africa, with an additional 20 percent coming from the US and Canada, another 21 percent from Latin America, and a similar percentage from Europe.

The findings in the report highlight the experiences and strategies of data centre owners and operators in the areas of resiliency, sustainability, efficiency, regulations, staffing, cloud and innovative technologies.

Owen noted: “The survey has revealed that digital infrastructure managers are now most concerned with improving energy performance and dealing with staffing shortfalls. At the same time, government commitments to reduce carbon emissions are nearing their target deadlines and, as a result, regulations aimed at data centre energy use require urgent attention, investment and action.

“In addition, many of the organisations surveyed remain wary of using the public cloud for mission critical applications, with their primary concern being data security, and concern about infrastructure performance and resiliency being less significant. Two-thirds (65 percent) of respondents to the survey are not hosting any mission-critical applications in the public cloud, with many saying that they preferred to operate their own data centres and have greater control. Respondents also believed that their data centres were less likely to experience outages than public cloud operators.

According to Owen, the findings show that concerns within the African data centre arena are closely tracking similar industry concerns globally.

Local market growth predictions

Nigeria’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector is currently experiencing robust expansion, fuelled by industries including the oil and gas sector, financial services industry and the fintech arena. The rollout of 5G and advances in cloud computing infrastructure are opening up new investment prospects for data centres. As a result, the local market is predicted to see significant growth in the next few years, and is projected to reach USD 646 million by 2030, having been valued at USD 250 million in 2023[1]. 

The ICT Services market in Ghana has been steadily growing over the past few years, playing a key role in the country’s broader economic growth.[2] According to the Ghana Investment Promotion Center, the ICT sector in Ghana is valued at about 1.5 billion Ghanaian cedis (around USD 9,5716,155) annually and is expected to continue to grow steadily.

“Against this encouraging background, Vertiv is proud to continue focusing on supporting the local data centre industry across the greater West African area,” explained Adebowale.“Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centres, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services.

“Vertiv powers and cools the data that drives the world. As Africa is poised to see significant growth in the local data centre market, we remain committed to supporting the continent’s evolving data storage, networking and compute power requirements,” he concluded.