International company Aurecon has noted the steady growth of data consumption across the world. In a statement it said over 90% of all the data in the world was created in the past two years, and the total amount of data being captured and stored by industry doubles almost year on year.
Furthermore, it said it is expected that by 2020, the amount of digital information in existence will have grown from 3.2 zettabytes today to 40 zettabytes. Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1.8 million Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets and upload 200 thousand photos to Facebook.
Coupled to this, cellular phones are now even more accessible to the general population than they ever have been, with 17.9% of rural households in South Africa alone accessing the internet from mobile devices and 30.8% of South African households using mobile devices to access the internet, according to Statistics South Africa’s General Household Survey report published in June 2014.
The sheer size of the African continent, coupled with the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is rising faster than the rest of the world (Population Reference Bureau predicts that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion by 2050) means that there are already several hundred million internet users who are demanding internet performance, and this number will rise at an inconceivable pace.
Peter Greaves, Aurecon’s Expertise leader for Data & ICT Facilities comments: “The impact of this is that telecom operators will have to find better, smarter ways to serve a data-hungry population throughout Africa. Corporations and governments are also becoming aware of the increased need for data centres and the fact that outsourcing these services allows them to focus on their core activities. Concerns about unreliable power and inadequate security can similarly be delegated to a dedicated third party that will guarantee the required uptime and data integrity.”
