Edge Datacenters

In late March, network monitoring vendor Kentik hosted a virtual panel session with Netflix, Zoom, Dropbox and Equinix, discussing how the coronavirus outbreak has affected each company's operations. A common thread during the session was that services have simply accelerating their growth plans, meaning they have coped but have absorbed any safety buffer that was in place.

Africa and especially the Middle East currently lag the rest of the world in terms of the number of reported cases of people infected with the coronavirus. As a result, many of the countries that are home to the key datacenter markets across the MEA region have yet to implement the extreme measures that have locked down societies in recent weeks.

It is the role of datacenter operators to be resilient – their customers expect that the lights will be kept on during any major disrupting event. This does not mean the current pandemic does not test the industry – far from it. Providers and customers have learned valuable lessons from the past.

Cloud and service providers are expected to drive the growth in datacenter capacity

It's probably no surprise that analysts like to have buckets to put technologies, companies and markets into. It's a quick way to group things together in order to talk about them in a big-picture way. Given that, it's not surprising that sometimes we need a new bucket. Enter Software Programmable Interconnection (SPI).

Datacenter operators are targeting enterprises in a bigger way than ever before, pitching colocation as a connectivity hub that can easily and securely connect to multiple destinations, especially public clouds. It's a logical argument, but the datacenter providers are challenged with getting colocation onto the roadmap of the average-sized enterprise.

451 Research projects that the global colocation and wholesale market will exceed $54 billion in revenue by 2023, according to its Q1 2019 Datacenter KnowledgeBase (DCKB)

Cloud became a hot topic in Africa in 2017, with Microsoft becoming the first of the major cloud providers to actively target the continent with its products. What's more, a steady increase in the number of datacenters on the continent, combined with ever-improving connectivity infrastructure, is boosting confidence in cloud.