As South Africa’s electricity woes continue with renewed vigor into 2019, tens of millions of the country’s telecoms consumers have already experienced the effects of outages as their mobile phones switch over to base stations running on back-up power.

“Individual mobile users might not have noticed their signal moving from one network to another as their phones search for cell towers still up and running, but enterprise users dependent on information and communications technology (ICT) are most definitely noticing the need to Eskom-proof their operations,” says Juan Wiese, Group Business Development Manager at ICTGlobe.com.

For SMEs, onsite batteries may offer reasonable resilience to load-shedding, but for larger corporations, offsite data centres run by third-party specialists like ICTGlobe.com really are the only effective option. “Offsite data centres have always offered clients that extra redundancy but they’ve now taken on additional importance with South Africa’s current power challenges,” explained Mr. Wiese.

For client peace of mind, ICTGlobe.com owns or operates in top-rated data centres in Centurion, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The company peers with 95% of South African telecoms networks which is an added benefit for business connectivity.

Mr Wiese outlines five resilience-boosting attributes of the ICTGlobe.com-owned data centre:

– Double entry biometric access control monitored onsite and offsite is an effective response to South Africa’s unique crime challenges. Complementing this is CCTV footage and access logs that are retained for a full year.

– Smart cooling takes into account the harsh South African climate and in practice this means fully-redundant hot air containment.

– 100% uptime is ensured with double backup power generators. In addition, each primary and secondary power feed to the building is fed through automated switchover UPS equipment, each with their own battery banks.

– A two stage fire detection system offers early warning and fire suppression capabilities. Staff are alerted of possible fire changes in the environment and this capability is complemented by an FM 200 equipment and human-friendly fire suppression system.

– Finally, flooding is prevented with leak sensors and notifications, as well as automated water pumps that kick-in before any H2O-related headaches.

Whether hosting or co-location services, Cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service, disaster recovery or business continuity services, ICTGlobe.com’s data centres leverage proprietary tools and methodologies to improve organisational efficiencies.

Published by: www.whichvoip.co.za