Tech startups and other rapidly emerging innovation-driven businesses in Uganda have been urged to make use of locally available data centres to save costs.
According to Richard Zulu, the team leader at Outbox, using servers located outside the country is more costly especially to private businesses to keep their data.
“These days everything including the distance and size of the communication are billed and it becomes expensive to use that service. By using local data centres like Raxio, startups will see if as being less expensive.”
“When you build a fintech, it has to be hosted somewhere on a server and every time a user access the services, it communicates with the server, back and forth. When the users grow, the capacity of that server has to increase but the bigger the distance from the location of fintech to the server, the more the costs.”
Zulu insisted that it is high time local fintechs made use of the local data centre owned by Raxio.
“When a company like Raxio comes up to support fintechs by hosting them locally, the costs are lowered.”
He was speaking during during a workshop by Raxio data held at Outbox for innovators held under the theme “How Raxio Data Centre can power your business.”
As part of the workshop, Raxio data also launched a promotion which runs up to December, 31 targeting fintechs, research and innovation firms, microfinance and insurance to offer free cross-connect when they buy a 1/2 rack (1KW) or 1/4 rack (500W).
Raxio Data Centre is Uganda’s first state-of-the-art data centre located at the Namanve Industrial and Business Park owned by Roha, a US greenfield investment company.
According to Abdul-Rahman Ahmed, Raxio Data Centre’s vice president in charge of tech and operations, data centers are of great use to the world for data usage and storage as well as the broader digital transformation of the country.
“There is a data centre boom because these days everything we deal with generates data. For example a hospital will need personal details of a patient including their past visits, the illness and the doctors who treated them. All this and more are data and at the end of the day you need a data centre .For you to have a digitalized economy, have thriving fintechs, to thrive in artificial intelligence, you need a data centre,” Ahmed said.
The expert from Raxio data centre noted that it is high time government made use of the country’s first Tier III, truly carrier-neutral co-location facility.
“Covid helped us accelerate digital transformation and this should continue. There is a world class facility locally yet the Ministry of ICT has a lot of requests from the public to build data centres. It will cost government more in building those data centers than harnessing our facility. This will attract other data centre developers in Uganda.”
“We are telling government we have a world class facility which will create employment for Ugandans and will boost the economy.”
Allen Najjuuko, the Raxio Data Centre’s Sales Manager said having engaged with players in the industry, they have noted the demand for MSMEs who have smaller data storage needs but require the infrastructure and support.
“We are supporting the growth of corporate and MSMEs businesses in Uganda that appreciate the need for 99.999% uptime to support critical operations for their enterprise, commercial and corporate businesses. Why try to invest in hardware or getting your own computer room to meet your digital challenges instead of making use of a local data centre and from a financial perspective, you save a lot of money that would go into using a server owned in countries abroad.”
