Vodacom's business arm is opening its eighth data centre in SA - a 3 000 square metre facility in Midrand.
Vodacom Business says the new facility "adds significantly" to Vodacom Business' hosting capacity, and will help it deliver on its new cloud strategy. The company says South African businesses are increasingly looking to move from traditional on-site hosting to a shared data centre environment enabled by cloud or hosted services.
Ermano Quartero, managing executive at Vodacom Business SA, says research shows cost of bandwidth, smartphones, storage and compute continue to decline at a fast pace, increasing the business case for cloud and hosting services.
The new Vodacom Business centre, dubbed Data Park, was conceived in response to what Vodacom says was "much faster than expected utilisation of space" in its first Midrand data centre, driven by a rapid uptake of cloud services.
"Data Park will be an extension to our existing facilities and will allows us scale to service our customers for all cloud services from infrastructure as a service, to software as a service and platform as a service."
Cloud growth
Vodacom says, as its local customer base passes the 32.5 million mark and with data traffic having increased by 70% on the previous year, the company is investing heavily in infrastructure.
"This year alone, the group is investing R9 billion in its network in SA in order to continue to meet the demand for high-speed access and data services. The Data Park investment is in line with this vision and supports Vodacom Business' overall growth goals in the access and cloud services areas."
Quartero notes that with the advent of low-cost, high-speed transmission - both via fibre and mobile - cloud services are now economically viable for smaller businesses in a way they never were before.
"Today, businesses tend to own on-site servers to store data and run enterprise software. These servers can be expensive to buy and run, and need to be maintained and upgraded on a regular basis. On top of this, the software they run requires regular upgrades. Finally, dedicated IT support staff are needed to keep all this running smoothly.
"There is another way. Businesses across SA and into Africa are recognising that as low-cost, high-speed connections become increasingly available, all of these services can be moved off-site to optimised, cloud-based data centres. This translates into capex savings, stability benefits, and savings in running costs, including reduced power bills."
Share