Trends impacting on South African datacentres
Big data is fast taking roots in Africa where business units are increasingly demanding capabilities that involve real-time analytics and immense intelligence in their IT operations. In a South African company where a friend works in marketing department, they deliver sales messages to mobile phones based on a customer’s purchasing history, social media platforms activities, location among many other sensor data. That has not stopped them from running customers relations management system and other applications on the same infrastructure. In our recent conversation he informed me that their data-centres have the flexibility to meet all these varying needs, and handles usage spikes by shifting resource utilisation instead of them maintaining costly excess capacity that can at times go unused for significant periods of time. The South African firm has employed greater simplicity in the physical infrastructure, solution stack, and the tools used to monitor and manage operations. Infrast