MTN Business launches a tier 3 datacenter in Kenya forges on partnerships to drive cloud adoption

MTN Business has launched a tier-3 datacenter in Nairobi Kenya, a total investment of close to Ksh 1.3 billion that the company says is in line with its strategy of enabling sustainable growth for corporations, SMEs and the public sector.

The tier-3 datacenter is the 48th datacenter launched by MTN Group, which operates in 24 countries across Africa and the Middle East.

A tier-e center is “composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, but only one path active, has redundant components, and is concurrently maintainable, providing 99.982% availability,” according to the Uptime Institute.

“Shifts in business towards greater specialization and disaggregation mean that companies no longer need to store their data and MTN datacentres have specialized business in this area,” said Mr. Kennedy Chinganya, managing director, MTN Business Kenya. “Our new datacentre will enable our customers to take full advantage of technology innovation such as cloud computing, virtualization and convergence.”

Mr. Chinganya also added that the complex was established using the most rigorously engineered IP networks in order to meet the business needs of immediate access, data security and lower operational costs for companies in Kenya.

The company has also focused on partnerships with other technology companies, a key partnership being with Microsoft where, through the MTN platform, customers will be able to access Microsoft cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365, the company said.

The move will help propel more companies especially SMEs to move to the cloud, said Mr. Chinganya, who called for more partnerships.

MTN has laid over 250 miles of fibre infrastructure covering Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Eldoret Metros and will have more than 600 fibre-ready commercial buildings by end of 2017, the company has said.