Pamoja has announced that it will roll out cloud services to the rapidly-expanding East Africa market.
The company is hosting its cloud platform at Liquid Telecom’s East Africa Data Centre in Nairobi.
The company selected Nairobi, Kenya as its cloud service delivery base because of its strategic location in relation to other countries in the East African market.
Liquid Telecom’s East Africa Data Centre is the largest and most sophisticated carrier-neutral data centre in East Africa and is the ideal facility in which Pamoja can host its cloud platform. The Nairobi cloud platform compliments Pamoja’s other cloud platform that is located in South Africa.
Executive management at Pamoja says the data centre facilities meet the company’s availability, security and connectivity needs. These are also base criteria for the ISO 27001 certification process which Pamoja has embarked upon. The ISO 27001 standard is the specification for an Information Security Management System.
The objective of the standard itself is to “provide requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continuously improving an Information Security Management System (ISMS)”.
“By interconnecting the two Pamoja platforms through the Seacom submarine cable infrastructure we are able to firstly provide cloud services with a regional presence and secondly offer geographic redundancy to customers who demand this,” says Albie Bester, GM at Pamoja.
“With physical cloud infrastructure in Africa Pamoja is able to address customer concerns about the location of their sensitive data and ensure improved service response times compare to cloud services that are hosted in Europe or the US,” Bester adds.
The Kenyan and South African cloud platforms are managed by the Pamoja cloud services team with support from Seacom network operations.
“Our cloud platform is based on the Microsoft Dynamic Datacentre blue print and through the use of advanced management and monitoring systems it is possible to ensure the highest level of availability with a relatively small team of experts,” Bester says.
Pamoja is poised to help businesses across the continent take advantage of the shift towards cloud, the impact of the internet and social networks on the corporate space and the relevance of cloud computing to core operations across most businesses.
Forrester Research forecasts that the global market for cloud computing will grow from $40,7-billion to more than $241-billion in 2020.
According to Bester, cloud adoption in Africa is in an exciting and budding phase and although issues like quality of connectivity and stable electricity sources still represent challenges, infrastructure is improving all the time.
“Soon Africa will be ready to consume cloud services at a large scale.”