Access Kenya Group has announced a new market push for Cloud Services in East Africa. Owing to its ongoing business acceleration and expansion strategy, the company now says it will target new businesses with a total Managed Services solution as its core business focus over the next three years.

The Corporate Internet and Information Technology Solutions provider now seeks to cement its position as a market leader in the regional cloud technology space. With enterprises re-looking at how best to meet their internal IT needs while accelerating service delivery in a cost effective way, Access Kenya intends to deliver the best service proposition for IT as a service (ITaas), ICT Outsourcing, Next Generation Data Centre and Applications Services.

According to Deputy Chief Executive, Kris Senanu, AccessKenya - which was acquired in 2013 by the Dimension Data - will leverage its global synergies within the group with a view of becoming the preferred ICT partner for businesses seeking end to end cloud solutions.

In June Dimension Data acquired the business continuity management firm Continuity S.A. The move brings to bear a combined 37, 000 m2 of Data Center and Recovery facilities in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Mauritius.

The center is expected to bolster the enhanced expansion of our metropolitan and fiber optic network across the country. The pre-existing facility has undergone an upgrade in response to increased demand. With an initial investment, KSh 8 million was used to deploy the new equipment and additional space, with the total project expected to cost in the region of Kshs 25 million to complete phase two of the upgrade in 2014.

This offers more high availability services such as replication of critical applications, thus allowing one to operate these applications from multiple locations. Additional benefits include the continuity of service from a secondary site that would take over seamlessly in the event of a failure of the primary site meaning that they would not experience any outage.

AccessKenya is the leader in Kenya's metropolitan fibre network with coverage of 430km connecting more than 560 buildings in the capital Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa. It has slightly more than 6,000 corporate leased lines.

" These infrastructure investments give us increased capability and reach enabling us to offer the most competitive value proposition in business continuity management, IT disaster recovery and data replication among other value added services," Said Deputy Chief Executive, Kris Senanu, AccessKenya

Currently the AccesKenya Cloud services portfolio includes managed hardware & software services, hosted email, LAN networking, specialist IT support, outsourced virtual servers and Collocation. The company's cloud services are designed to meet the IT needs of growing small and medium businesses (SMB). Instead of buying, installing and maintaining software and servers, SMB's can focus on their core business and get their IT delivered as a service.