Safaricom Bets Ksh 2 Billion on its New Cloud Services

Safaricom finally unveiled what it claims to be the largest indigenous public Cloud solution in East and Central Africa region.

To set the solution off, Safaricom say it has invested an initial Sh2 billion in putting up the necessary infrastructure, while it expects to pump another Sh1.5 billion in the venture within the next two years.

Safaricom has launched the Cloud computing product called SafaricomCLOUD through a partnership between Safaricom, Seven Seas, EMC² and Cisco.

Seven Seas Technologies will be the integration partner, global networking leader Cisco and EMC², which has built a name worldwide for its expertise in building Cloud infrastructure.

This is the first time that a mobile-phone service provider has made such a large-scale implementation of Cloud services infrastructure in Africa, bringing together the biggest partners in Cloud technologies, and offering such a wide scale of solutions including data center as a service (virtual machines), storage as a service, back- up and recovery, archiving and disaster recovery.

SafaricomCLOUD looks to free organizations from the need for the large capital expenditure needed to set up entire IT departments, offer companies assured business continuity. It will also be focusing on offering companies access to best of breed infrastructure based on need (data centre as a service) and serving to meet the needs of their teams and employees (storage as a service and back-up as a service).

The service further looks to enable clients to deliver to business requirements quickly and with unparalleled agility (hosted application services); meeting increasingly stringent governance or compliance requirements (disaster recovery as a service and archiving as a service) and providing a secure environment to protect customer’s data and information (managed security as a service).

Outsourcing IT functions provides clients with greater flexibility but also reduces the risks to the organization, while materially changing staffing profiles. Using IT as a service for instance, can reduce the need for skilled IT professionals by the organization as the client migrates more functions to the clouds