Ratio Magazine :: The Inside Track to East Africa’s Economies - Kenya: Press Releases: Safaricom Launch Largest Indigenous Cloud in the Region

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Kenya: Press Releases: Safaricom Launch Largest Indigenous Cloud in the Region

Thursday, 27 October 2011

Nairobi, 26 October 2011 --- Converged communications firm Safaricom has today unveiled the largest indigenous public cloud solution in the region. To launch the solution, Safaricom has invested an initial KES2bn in putting up the necessary infrastructure, while a further KES1.5bn is expected to be deployed in the venture within the next two years.

The launch of the cloud computing product called SafaricomCLOUD, has been made possible through a raft of partnerships between Safaricom and a number of leading global IT companies: The consortium includes Seven Seas Technologies as the integration partner, global networking leader Cisco and EMC², which has built a name worldwide for its expertise in building cloud infrastructure.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. It is an example of what are called managed services in the trade. These refer to a suite of corporate data services that an increasing number of companies and organisations prefer to out-source to companies with better expertise in these areas. This then frees up the organisation’s resources which can then be deployed fully on core business.

Cloud computing allows a company to seek a number of IT services relevant to its operations, under a cost-efficient, money-saving, a la carte, pay-for-what-you-use model. Such services may include a data centre, disaster recovery, back-up, software applications, among others.

“This launch means a great deal for us and shows that the partnerships we have built pack great strategic potential and value for our customers. With this move, we have solidly positioned ourselves as the go-to provider for cost-efficient and secure corporate data solutions of scale and impact in this market,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore at the launch event.

He acknowledged the various partners’ credentials and noted that backed by Safaricom’s unmatched data infrastructure, the firms were best placed to offer practical solutions not just for the corporate world, but also for public service organisations in areas such as health, education and agriculture, among others.

“We believe that the full potential of enterprise data services will not be tapped unless we deploy ‘world class’ solutions to match corporate and public sector requirements. Our partnership with SST, Cisco and EMC² on the SafaricomCLOUD is sharply focused on achieving this end through an unmatched cloud computing offering,” added Mr Collymore.

This is the first time that a service provider has made such a large-scale implementation of cloud services infrastructure in Africa, bringing together the biggest partners in cloud technologies, and offering such a wide scale of solutions including data center as a service (virtual machines), storage as a service, back- up and recovery, archiving and disaster recovery.

Besides freeing organisations from the need for the large capital expenditure needed to set up entire IT departments, the SafaricomCLOUD is expected to offer companies assured business continuity, access to best-of-breed infrastructure based on need (data centre as a service) and serve to meet the needs of their teams and employees (storage as a service and back-up as a service).

It will enable clients to deliver to business requirements quickly and with unparalleled agility (hosted application services), meet increasingly stringent governance or compliance requirements (disaster recovery as a service and archiving as a service), and provide a secure environment to protect customer’

Outsourcing IT functions provides clients with greater flexibility but also reduces the risks to the organisation, while materially changing staffing profiles. Using IT as a service, for instance, can reduce the need for skilled IT professionals by the organisation as the client migrates more functions to the cloud.

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