What does the data centre of the future look like?

Six years since opening its doors, Teraco Data Environments - sub-Saharan Africa's first provider of resilient, vendor neutral data environments - says the path to 2020 will provide an equivalent amount of innovation and evolution as the data centre becomes an even more vital cog in the wheel of business.

CEO Lex van Wyk, says that Teraco has been fortunate to play a part in the data centre evolution: "Identifying the gap and taking market share is not always easy, but six years in and three multi-data centre facilities nationwide, Teraco has established itself as a data centre of choice with the successful provision of reliable and resilient infrastructure."

Van Wyk says Teraco is the only data centre with access to all undersea cables and the most African fibre networks: "Through NAPAfrica, Teraco's open peering and Africa's biggest Internet exchange, we house five of the largest global content players and estimate that 50% of content across the continent is accessed via NAPAfrica, making Teraco the most connected, neutral environment in Africa."

The advent of the cloud, says Van Wyk, is driving the growth and further significance of data centres. "There is a definite move towards using a specialised cloud resource rather than duplicating infrastructure resource evidence of which lies in Gartner's predicted growth of $107 billion between 2013 and 2017. We especially see this in the enterprise, where organisations are driving towards Layer 3 IT strategies and making a decisive move away from Capex to Opex, which is essentially a pay-per-use model."

Data centre as a Service (DCaaS), is also a reality, according to Van Wyk: "Colocating is the first step towards DCaaS. With over 180 clients, Teraco has already made significant inroads into this space and it will continue to grow. Our ability to white label services between cloud providers is a major plus for Teraco and its service providers, making all pay-per-use options easier to initiate, manage and market."

Teraco has also achieved a full ISO 9001 quality certification with no exclusions, as well as Payment Card Industry Data Security standard (PCI DSS). Both certifications cover all three of Teraco's operational data centres in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. These aspects are critically important for meeting POPI requirements.

According to van Wyk other factors influencing the growth of cloud and as a consequence, data centres are: "big data, thin client devices, mobility, - these technologies are completely reliant on access to diverse connectivity products. The widest choice of carriers and connectivity aggregates in a vendor neutral environment."