Expansion into West Africa builds on South African implementation
Zadara, the recognised leader in edge cloud services, has extended its African footprint by bringing its global federated edge service to Africa Data Centres’ new facility in Lagos, Nigeria. “With the African data centre market expected to experience a CAGR of 15% over the coming years, the time is now to bring these benefits to the continent,” notes Smith Osemeke the MD/CEO of Unitellas International Limited. Zadara provides resilient, enterprise-grade products and services, including its Federated Edge programme.
The move into Nigeria follows the announcement in July 2021 when Africa Data Centres added edge cloud services to its Midrand marketplace in South Africa. Africa Data Centres owns and operates Africa’s largest network of interconnected, carrier- and cloud-neutral data centre facilities. Where the Midrand deployment involved service provider Global Sense, in West Africa Zadara is working with Unitellas, a Nigerian-based full-stack managed infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Unitellas’ offering includes compute, network and storage services tailored for the needs of service providers and the modern enterprise. The expansion to Lagos is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2021.
According to Jody Martin, cloud product manager for Africa Data Centres: “West African enterprises are looking at cloud technology, but it will be vital to build trust to mitigate concerns around data sovereignty, security and privacy. Addressing these issues will be vital if we are to onboard new cloud providers. Enterprises can take advantage of the cost, flexibility and scalability of the cloud while local data centres provide the unique ability to control, localize and secure physical access to data. Through our ecosystem of partners, customers have access to multiple cloud onramps and connectivity options. Data centres and cloud technology provide a platform for effective disaster recovery, cloud migrations and hybrid solutions. Increasing the richness of the ecosystem by adding partners like Zadara and Unitellas, makes our Lagos-based offering even more attractive to West African players.”
Africa Data Centres has facilities across Africa’s major regional business and trade hubs and aims to help drive Africa’s digital transformation using that network. Both multinationals and large African enterprises are being attracted to these growing hubs of cloud-based business operation—all provided in highly connected, physically secure and efficient facilities that are designed, built and operated to the standards demanded by leading global cloud providers, carriers and enterprises.
“Providing local access to world-class cloud technology aligns with our strategy of digitally transforming Africa,” says Martin. “The partnership between Unitellas and Zadara means that West African customers have at their disposal fully-managed IT infrastructure-on-demand, can flexibly scale their solutions as business needs change, simplifying potentially complex IT deployments so that they can focus on their core business. We value our continued growing partnership with Zadara through our secure, cloud and carrier-neutral facilities.”
Zadara delivers superior turnkey solutions with the benefits of on-demand compute and storage services anywhere, in an existing on-premises data centre, in a private colocation facility, or in the cloud. This flexibility enables customers to develop, deploy, run and virtualise any application on a true 100% opex consumption-based model. Zadara’s arrival at the Africa Data Centres Marketplace brings award-winning infrastructure technology, including compute, storage, and networking to all local customers.
“We are proud to work with Africa Data Centres – their state-of-the-art data centres combined with Zadara technology will allow African organisations access to advanced, localised compute network and storage cloud services. Together, we are enabling customers to reduce cost, increase agility and drive productivity within their businesses,” says Osemeke.
