Three factors that drive data centre market development
Three things quietly decide whether a data centre market takes off: carrier neutrality, network latency and data sovereignty.
Three factors drive the development of a data centre market: carrier neutrality, network latency and data sovereignty. Here is how each one works.
Carrier neutrality
A carrier-neutral data centre is one with multiple telecom carriers and internet service providers present in the building. Access to several networks gives customers choice and promotes competition, which drives network costs down. But it only works if there are multiple network operators in the country or city to begin with. This is something we grapple with across much of Africa, where telecom sectors are often still closed to competition, leaving one or a few operators. When carrier network costs are high, there is less incentive for businesses to outsource to colocation or run their applications in the cloud.
Network latency
Latency is the time it takes data to travel down a fibre to its destination and back. Lower latency — being close to users, exchanges and the networks that serve them — matters for user experience and for where it makes sense to host workloads.
Data sovereignty
Where regulation requires certain data to be stored and processed within a country's borders, that demand has to be met by local infrastructure. Data sovereignty rules therefore pull data centre capacity into the markets they apply to.