Data infrastructure and colocation company Teraco will, as part of its plans for the next five years, continue to invest in its facilities and will make announcements on future expansions soon, Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo told Engineering News.

"Demand for our facilities is driven by enterprises adopting hybrid cloud strategies. In many cases, enterprises' information technology facilities are reaching their end-of-life and, given the need to ensure uptime at all times, the costs and the resources required, it makes more sense to outsource their data centre needs.

"These companies often use public cloud service providers, but also retain some of their processes within a private cloud, which can be hosted in a high-availability facility, such as that provided by Teraco, to ensure all their branches have ready access to them," he said.

Further, large cloud service providers see sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Africa as growing regions. Data centre facilities located in Southern Africa can serve users throughout the southern half of Africa and at lower latency than European cloud facilities.

"Cloud service providers aim to get closer to their users to provide good user experiences, and the result is that they are leveraging our facilities and great infrastructure in South Africa," Hnizdo added.

The growth in the number of subsea cable systems is massively positive for Africa and South Africa because they bring more capacity, through which cloud providers are making content available.

"Our ecosystem includes around 280 telecommunications service providers, onramps to all the public cloud service providers, 50 content providers, 150 managed services providers and enterprise clients, such as financial services and retail companies.

"Teraco provides the cost-effective and secure means through which this ecosystem interconnects," he highlighted.

"We are there for the interchange and processing of data. During the Covid-19-impacted period, data on our Internet exchange trebled compared with pre-Covid-19 and it has not since dropped off or eased. We will be launching new builds linked to our Isando, Ekurhuleni and Cape Town sites," Hnizdo added.