By Newsshelve Correspondent.
Lagos, Nigeria – Gbenga Adebowale, Enterprise Sales Director for Central Africa at Vertiv, highlighted the similarities between global and local data centre challenges during the West African leg of Vertiv’s ‘Accelerate’ events.
Adebowale emphasized that organisations in West Africa face identical issues as their global counterparts, including managing exploding data across distributed sites and environments, while navigating legacy infrastructure.
Adebowale noted that local businesses must also contend with unique regional challenges, such as unstable power and rising operational costs.
He advocated for harnessing intelligent infrastructure to overcome complexity, improve efficiencies, and accelerate data management.
Eben Owen, Senior Business Director, Anglophone Africa, Uptime Institute, corroborated Adebowale’s statements, citing the Uptime Institute’s 14th Annual Global Data Center Survey.
The survey, which collected responses from over 850 data centre owners and operators, revealed that digital infrastructure managers prioritize improving energy performance and addressing staffing shortfalls.
According to Owen, the survey’s key findings indicate that government commitments to reduce carbon emissions are nearing target deadlines, necessitating urgent attention to regulations governing data centre energy use.
Additionally, many organisations remain cautious about using public cloud for mission-critical applications, citing data security concerns.
Notably, two-thirds of respondents prefer operating their own data centres for greater control.
Owen emphasized that concerns within the African data centre arena closely track global industry concerns.
Nigeria’s ICT sector is experiencing robust expansion, driven by industries such as oil and gas, financial services, and fintech.
The rollout of 5G and advances in cloud computing infrastructure are opening up new investment prospects for data centres.
The local market is projected to reach USD 646 million by 2030, up from USD 250 million in 2023.
Ghana’s ICT Services market has been steadily growing, contributing to the country’s broader economic growth.
The ICT sector is valued at approximately 1.5 billion Ghanaian cedis (USD 95.7 million) annually and is expected to continue growing steadily.
Adebowale reaffirmed Vertiv’s commitment to supporting the local data centre industry across West Africa.
“Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centres, communication networks, and commercial and industrial facilities.
“As Africa experiences significant growth in the local data centre market, we remain dedicated to supporting the continent’s evolving data storage, networking, and compute power requirements.”
Vertiv’s presence in West Africa underscores the company’s focus on empowering local businesses to overcome data centre challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
With its comprehensive portfolio of power, cooling, and IT infrastructure solutions and services, Vertiv is well-positioned to support the region’s growing data centre needs.
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