Whitepaper: The Adoption and Use of Data Centre Standards in Africa

In this white paper, made by Mark Acton, Critical Support Director at Future-tech SCi Limited in collaboration with the Africa Dat Centres Association, it is explained why African nations and regions should adopt the global ISO standards framework for data centers.

Mainly speaking, there are two reasons:

Firstly, African nations have the ability to be members of the ISO committees creating these standards through their national standards bodies, and therefore directly influence the direction that these move in. This would give the ability to participate in, and influence, standards development which is currently not possible with National Standards foreign to Africa.

African nations can, through their national standards bodies, become members of the ISO committees – and therefore directly influence the direction that these move in

Secondly Africa has the ability to embrace and use the new and emerging global data centre benchmarks rather than having to conform to historic practices. The application and use of a set of common framework of reference points and benchmarks which are consistently applied globally will help to ensure that Africa is at the forefront of the development and deployment of resilient and high quality digital infrastructure across the region.

It would be useful to adopt the international framework from the outset as a guiding principle and pave the way for a far more robust future.

Some operators and customers will inevitably wish to reference and apply some of the more proprietary and historic practices from a sales and marketing perspective such as the Uptime Institute Tier Topology, particularly in the short term, but in principle it would be useful to adopt the international framework from the outset as a guiding principle and pave the way for a far more robust future.