African data centres will have to focus more on environmental protection, data security and privacy protection in the future, according to Zhou Yilin, Huawei director of IT consulting.

Speaking at the Pan African Data Centres Conference in Johannesburg, Yilin outlined some of the challenges and opportunities facing the sector.

He noted that increasing requirements for data storage and processing are driving the rapid development of data centres, while the sector is facing new challenges, including regional differences in policy environments, customer requirements and low-carbon sustainable development requirements.

The continent’s data centres are not alone in facing these challenges, so there are a growing number of global examples they can draw from to meet the evolving needs of their customers.

Yilin said African data centres will have to embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and edge computing, the construction of green data centres, and data security and privacy protection.

“With the increasing popularity of cloud computing and edge computing, data centres in Africa will face more challenges and opportunities. The centres and their service capabilities need to evolve and enrich to meet users’ requirements for intelligent, efficient, and secure services.”

The promotion of green data centres with reduced environmental impacts will also have a significant impact.

Digital transformation

“African governments have started to promote the construction of green data centres to reduce the impact of data centres on the environment. In the future, Africa’s data centres will focus more on environmental protection and sustainable development and adopt more energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies and equipment.

“With the increasing number of data breaches and cyberattacks, data centres in Africa will have to pay more attention to data security and privacy protection,” Yilin said. “Data centres need to adopt more secure and reliable technologies and solutions to enhance data encryption and access control to protect user data security and privacy.”

Meeting those opportunities and challenges head-on will become especially important as businesses across the continent continue to embrace accelerated digital transformation.

“As the key foundation for carrying digital economy services, data centres are the cornerstone of digital transformation in various industries. In the digital era, customer service scenarios in various industries are changing from single product integration to full-stack data centre integration.”

Huawei is well aware of these shifts and has worked hard to ensure that its data centre clients are able to meet and embrace them.

He said Huawei’s data centre integration service solution provides full-stack service solutions, including data centre facility integration, IT integration and auxiliary operation, migration and disaster recovery, scenario-based intelligence and campus digital platform integration.

“It covers the entire process of planning, construction and operation, meeting the requirements of comprehensive, efficient and intelligent construction in the architecture design, service rollout and system operation of the data centre.”

Huawei’s solutions can also help data centres achieve green, low-carbon and sustainable development.

“Huawei’s data centre integration service uses low carbon, energy saving and prefabricated assembly to build green and simplified scenario-based typical configuration solutions,” he said.

They’re also designed for optimal disaster recovery in the event of natural disasters, power failures, device damage or network outages.

Win-win results

“The data centre disaster recovery service provides automatic disaster warning, automatic recovery solution, one-click service switchover, and unified ransomware detection and recovery management. This helps customers improve service continuity and reduce DR management costs.

“To meet the high reliability requirements of industry systems, Huawei provides industry-leading disaster recovery consulting, integration, drill services, and intelligent management platforms for industries such as finance, government, healthcare, electric power and energy,” Yilin said.

Huawei adheres to the concept of professionalism, openness and win-win results.

“Together with partners, Huawei uses professional tools, industry-leading service standards and supports platforms such as open labs and service centres to provide IT service solutions for customers in the finance, government, carrier, large enterprise, education and healthcare industries.”