In a bid to meet rack space demand in the region, East African Data Centre has announced a ksh1 bn expansion by extending the centre to four floors, totaling 2000 sq. m. to beat rationing allocations to customers.

The only Tier 3 secure electronic data centre in east and central Africa, plays a key role in enabling financial and corporate organizations to hold data securely, protecting them in the event of cyber crime and offering 24/7 secure housing for their data and back-ups.

The data centre, which now houses Kenya's Internet Exchange Point, has been credited by the global Internet Society as a key factor in driving down internet prices in Kenya, to among the lowest in Africa.

The East Africa Data Centre hosts the Points of Presence for global carriers with international coverage, including Tata, Level3, Seacom, and Liquid Telecom, as well as carriers owning fibre network infrastructure, including Safaricom, JamiiTelcom, Access Kenya, Orange Telkom Kenya Ltd, Wananchi Online, and Frontier Optical Network.

It has transformed how data traffic is handled in the region. By providing a central point for interconnect services, it has reduced latency, improved data services, reduced costs and made it easier to transfer data across networks.

The establishment of African data has helped reduce costs of internet access while creating an environment that encourages innovation and entrepreneurial culture in the field of ICT and local businesses.

Within six months of starting, East African Data Centre had fully sold Phase 1 of the centre's rack space - which houses the servers holding data - amounting to the entire first floor. It has now opened another 500 sq m floor, which is already 90 per cent occupied, and with the third floor already prepped for occupancy, East Africa Data Centre unveiled plans to expand to the fourth floor immediately, to cater for demand.

The accelerated expansion in EADC's rack space has benefitted the local engineering and construction services sector, with all of the contractors for the expansion sourced locally.

It also comes amid growing concern for data security. In late 2013, Kenya's Information, Communication and Technology Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiangi, raised the flag on estimates that the country would lose an estimated KSh 2 billion (about US$23 million) through cyber crime, with the number of cyber attacks detected in Kenyan cyberspace more than doubling last year to 5.4m attacks, compared to 2.6m in 2012.

Financial institutions are also introducing potentially vulnerable web and mobile applications, with a recent study that sampled 33 online banking portals finding that only 2 of the 33 portals sampled had adequate online security deployed on their web application. As a result, many financial institutions are now looking into EADC to store their data, reported the Kenya Cyber Security Report 2014.

"Banks and financial institutions are the second largest type of occupant at the East Africa Data Centre, at about 30 per cent. With about 43 banks in Kenya, the demand for highly secure stable environments like ours, for use as disaster recovery, high-availability, or primary sites, has been rising," said Dan Kwach General Manager East Africa Data Centre.

The Data Centre recently signed a collaboration agreement with Teraco Data Environments in South Africa to share synergies between the two Data Centre Operators and improve EADC's efficiency and maximize on available investment opportunities.