Technology The sky’s the limit for Africa’s cloud use

Oracle’s new Joburg data centre leads big expansion, heralds better performance for businesses

● The opening this week of a Johannesburg data centre by global software giant Oracle paves the way for a new approach to providing cloud services across Africa.

Built to the same specifications as all its international data centres, which typically offer floor space of up to 18,500m2 and cost about R3bn, Oracle says the local facility “will boost cloud adoption across Africa while also helping businesses achieve better performance and drive continuous innovation”.

A data centre location is referred to by the company as a “cloud region”, since it provides cloud computing services to the entire region in which it is located. In this case, it will serve much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

However, the data centre is only the first step in a major expansion across the continent.

Oracle’s planned rollout will mark a shift beyond the traditional approach of putting down data centres, and will focus on building private data centres for groups of clients.

The result is that it can establish a presence in a new location in a few months rather than spending several years in planning and construction.

Cherian Varghese, Oracle’s MD for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and the Levant, told Business Times that the company had been in Africa for more than 30 years, with large operations and a solid set of customers, and the cloud region would catapult this presence.

“We have a unique concept called cloud@customer that puts a cloud behind the firewall of the customer and that acts as an extension of our nodal data centres,” he said this week.

“So with any upgrades happening on a global public data centre, the cloud@cusment, tomer also gets upgraded. While the cloud region is our first true public cloud in Africa, we have had localised infrastructure on the continent for quite some time.”

A full rollout of the service provides what Oracle calls a dedicated region cloud@customer, which it describes as “a fully managed cloud region built with Oracledesigned, high-performance infrastructure to help customers bring … services closer to existing data and applications”.

More significantly for many African countries, it allows for data sovereignty, in which all local hosting of data mandated by regulators is possible, while utilising full cloud operations. This gives Oracle the ability to offer its full cloud feature set across Sub-Saharan Africa, despite the data centre being in Johannesburg.

It also means Oracle is able to partner with regional providers, such as a collaboration with Orange, the French telecoms provider that is highly active in West Africa.

The two companies recently announced they would build Oracle Cloud regions using Orange’s infrastructure in Senegal and Ivory Coast, to ensure that all customer data is hosted locally while providing advanced cloud services.

“We strongly believe that digital technology is a catalyst for economic transformation on the African continent, contributing to sustainable employment and socioeconomic development,” said Alioune Ndiaye, chair and CEO of Orange Middle East and Africa.

Mark Walker, associate vice-president for South, East and West Africa at the International Data Corp (IDC), said during Wednesday’s launch of the Johannesburg data centre that cloud had become a ubiquitous technology platform, and its growth was not about to slow down.

“The more you use cloud, the more you need data centre infrastructure to support it,” he said. “Data centres also provide a more secure and reliable method to use technology. Oracle’s investments are absolutely critical in this regard.”

Jon Tullett, the IDC’s senior research manager for IT services in Africa, told Business Times the demand for cloud capacity in Africa over the next five years is headed “to the moon”.

“Data centre investment right now,” he said.

“Multiple hyperscale-class data centres are under construction, many with global cloud customers as anchor tenants. South Africa is at the leading edge of that investis very high but much of it is eyeing broader African markets as well. There are data centre builds taking place all over the continent.

“Cloud as a field is broad. There are very different use-cases, all of which are growing rapidly. Over time some of these will overlap but, in many cases, it’s not just complementary growth, it’s multiplicative: as more enterprise applications move to [cloud], the tidal effect draws others along.

“The next five years will be all about that tide; that’s what’s sustaining the high revenue growth throughout our long-term forecasts.”

For this reason, said Varghese, the multidelivery format used by Oracle was key to digital growth.

“This is going to help our large customers, our medium customers, and our new developer community. The people who were small or who want to explore, innovate and express themselves in cloud development will see this cloud region help their journey.”

The Johannesburg data centre marks Oracle’s 37th cloud region worldwide, with plans to expand to 44 by the end of 2022. Local clients include Airports Company SA, the Government Pensions Administrative Agency, MTN and Telkom.

However, according to Tullett, the data centre race is not about competing for customers.

“The cloud pie is growing fast enough to feed everyone,” he said.

While the cloud region is our first true public cloud in Africa, we have had localised infrastructure on the continent for quite some time Cherian Varghese

Oracle’s MD for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and the Levant