With the launch, Digital Realty is further strengthening its presence in West Africa, accelerating digital transformation across the region, and expanding access to its global data center platform, PlatformDIGITAL.

Located in the nearby coastal area of Lekki, LKK2 adds nearly 2MW of installed IT capacity across nearly 13,000 square feet of data hall space, supporting the growing demand for scalable, high-performance infrastructure across Nigeria and the broader region.

LKK2 will be interconnected with Digital Realty’s existing LKK1 facility, which serves as the landing station for the 2Africa subsea cable, offering customers seamless access to the cable’s 46+ landing points in 33 countries across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The integration of LKK2 with the 2Africa cable landing station at LKK1 enables businesses in West Africa to leverage low-latency connectivity and reliable access to global cloud and network services. This setup supports improved application performance and enhances access to international digital ecosystems through a carrier-neutral platform.

This new facility integrates with ServiceFabric, Digital Realty’s global interconnection and orchestration platform, ensuring low-latency, high-throughput connectivity to local, regional, and international destinations.

Through ServiceFabric, LKK2 will interconnect with LOS1, the region’s top internet peering point, and LOS2, Digital Realty’s highly connected data centers located on Victoria Island in Lagos.

Together, this ecosystem delivers robust resilience, redundancy, speed, and scale for enterprise and hyperscale customers seeking to expand into a fast-growing digital market, ensuring continuous, reliable operations.

“LKK2 is a significant milestone in our journey to support digital transformation in Africa,” said Ike Nnamani, managing director, Digital Realty in Nigeria. “Our continued investment in Nigeria and the broader African region reinforces our commitment to enabling seamless global interconnectivity and providing a future-ready infrastructure platform for local and global enterprises.”

This strategic expansion reinforces Digital Realty’s commitment to advancing Africa’s digital transformation by delivering the infrastructure and connectivity needed to support innovation and growth across the continent.

Recently ranked number one in Africa on Cloudscene’s Data Center Ecosystem Leaderboard, the company continues to cement its position as a leading enabler of the continent’s digital future.

Akinsanya Leads NiRA Team on Tour of Digital Realty Data Centre Facility in Lagos

With the exponential growth of data and the acceleration of digital initiatives across the region, LKK2 provides the additional capacity which enterprises and content providers need to grow, scale, and connect – wherever and whenever they need to.

LKK2, due to become operational later this year, will support both local enterprises and multinational organizations seeking reliable, secure, and interconnected infrastructure in Africa.

Over the past several years sustainability has become a growing priority for most, if not all, organisations. Forward-thinking businesses, consumers and governments alike are increasingly looking at how to increase their sustainability efforts, while many decisions are increasingly being made with enhancing sustainability as an important driver.

One key trend to this end for businesses is moving to hybrid cloud services including colocation. In simple terms, colocation entails renting out a dedicated space for servers and sharing that space with others.

Doing so combines a wide range of operational and commercial benefits with potentially substantial sustainability improvements.

Data centres have long been recognised as being a major consumer of global energy. In 2020, they represented nearly half (47%) of IT energy demand and is expected to grow further to 61% before the end of the decade.

Colocation is a viable solution to this issue for several reasons: it meets the exacting requirements of the IT team, makes clear cost-saving sense, and opens up greener ways of hosting and processing data.

As a growing number of organisations are looking to upgrade their legacy infrastructure and move their network and server operations off-site, outsourcing to colocation services also makes sense – it frees up significant budget and space, while improving energy efficiency and reducing overall complexity.

For organisations that already have a sufficient IT strategy and expertise in-house, it’s an ideal arrangement. Their IT team retain control of their network, servers, and storage, enabling them to manage costs and monitor performance, while the third-party provider takes charge of physical expenditure like cooling, power, bandwidth and building maintenance.

Crucially from a cost point of view, the organisation only pays for the resources it uses.

The IT benefits of colocation are particularly compelling. Going the colocation route delivers easy and cost-effective connections to multiple network and Internet providers, guarantees reliability of available power with protection from outages, and organisations have the flexibility to scale up and down easily — using only the space and power required at a given time.

Colocation also reduces the need for costly real estate and tenancy agreements, and many providers offer certified physical security as well as cybersecurity, ensuring protection against risks like fire, unauthorised access or theft, and the ever-present threat of cyberattacks.

While these benefits may represent the proverbial ”carrot” to move to colocation, there are also drivers that represent the ”stick.” For example, as the urgency around climate change grows, the environmental regulations and demands for carbon reporting placed on organisations globally will only increase.

The European Union has launched the Assessment Framework for Data Centres as part of the European Taxonomy highlighting the need for computing to become more energy efficient, with measures being put forth to enforce green data centres which rely on renewable energy and reuse waste energy sources such as heat.

And then there are soaring energy prices that continue to reach record levels amid the reality of reduced supply.

This is adding pressure on organisations to reduce their energy consumption. Multinational and local players who are expanding their footprint in Africa are already looking at benchmarks for sustainable interventions from design through construction and operations of new data centres, as decarbonisation and the drive towards net zero advances across the continent.

The good news is that the adoption of new digital technologies enabled by 5G, fibre and cloud computing could help the tech sector reduce its global carbon emissions by 40% before 2030.

In fact, colocation has a great deal to offer when it comes to enhancing sustainability. For example, a combination of greater hardware efficiency, compute utilisation and more sustainable software engineering is driving improved power usage effectiveness.

We are also seeing colocation taking place in purpose-built facilities that are strategically located near reliable sources of power and designed with high-density cooling in mind.

Additionally, the sector is making a collective effort to reach 100% renewable electricity for their cloud platforms across several geographies as they drive continued efficiencies in their data centres. Increasingly, providers are incorporating alternative and renewable sources of electricity such as solar, wind, hydro and geothermal heat. Some colocation providers are also innovating by replacing backup generators with sustainable alternatives such as renewable powered battery storage and fuel cells.

Further, colocation providers are making a concerted effort to embrace a circular economy, recycling hardware and exploring new strategies for water management and heat recovery to reduce their reliance on the electrical grid and minimise waste across their operations.

This is also buoyed by a strong effort to move data to the edge. Doing so significantly reduces the volume of traffic going back to the centralised data centre and thus requires fewer physical resources to support it, such as servers, cooling, and power.

When targeting colocation, organisations should ensure they select a partner that has the right credentials in place such as a Science Based Target, CDP rating or equivalent as well as those that are transparent around key metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Renewable Energy Factor (REF), and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). Additionally, partners should have the ability to design sustainability from the ‘network up’ into the colocation data centre by taking into consideration what can be virtualised and right-sizing capacity for equipment.

The bottom line is that colocation is a truly viable way for organisations to avail themselves of all the benefits of having a data centre and using their data for business advantage, while similarly doing their part to ensure that thriving in a digital economy is as environmentally friendly as possible.

Facilities like Teraco, Vantage, NTT, and ADC have opened and grown in recent years due to increasing demand from enterprises suffering from continued loadshedding.

But what are the benefits?

The biggest drawcard of colocation facilities worldwide is the specialised services they offer. These providers have expert facilities managers who have skills in security, power, and cooling – which few enterprises will have in their own data centres.

This division of labour lowers risk and addresses many of the concerns enterprises have in running their own data centres.

The second reason for the growth in colo is connectivity. The better colo facilities have free peering points as well as private exchanges that serve as onramps into local and hyperscale cloud providers.

The prevalence of good value, fast and reliable connectivity into the data centre now makes colocation an acceptable option.

In South Africa, of course, there’s a third – and very important – reason: colo offers reliable power during rolling power cuts.

Enterprises using cloud also get these same benefits, reducing and segregating the operational risk by not having to rely on employees to manage the infrastructure. VMware Cloud, for example, offers migration tools as part and parcel of the solution.

And the pitfalls

Enterprises using owned hardware in colocation benefit from this reduced risk, flexible connectivity, and reliability. But of course, you pay for it. This means it’s not for everyone, but for those who do go the colocation route, the pricing is at least very predictable.

There are several examples in developed countries of unexpected overspending running wild following the move of traditional IT operations-based infrastructure into hyperscale cloud.

This has led to repatriation onto owned infrastructure or private cloud offered by local cloud operators with predictable price models. But in South Africa, we have the benefit of learning from such overseas mistakes.

Without going the overspending route, we already know that the next step is migration onto the cloud, with a combination of hyperscalers such as AWS or Azure and private cloud solutions such as VMware. And, for those currently running their own data centres, a colo solution to boot. This means more predictable pricing, a cloud solution suited to each particular workload, as well as reduced risk and improved connectivity and reliability.

Finding the right balance

Of course, the most important condition for colo and cloud to be viable is fast, reliable, cheap internet – typically provided by fibre optic cable. Fibre has finally penetrated all South African metro areas, making colo and cloud sustainable solutions.

Realistically, most enterprises will benefit from not just choosing between colocation and cloud, but a combination of both – and using multiple cloud providers.

Overseas examples, unfortunately, have made people reasonably sceptical of cloud hyperscalers. The internet is littered with case studies of enterprises failing to complete the migration to hyperscale cloud due to operational difficulties after replatforming traditional workloads.

Again, we get to learn from their mistakes: moving everything onto a hyperscale cloud seems like a straightforward solution, but the reality is that every cloud provider is not fit-for-purpose for every app.

Picking a single platform to keep things simple can mean suffering performance or commercial problems. Using multiple providers introduces complexity to your final solution, but each set of workloads will be in an ideal place. It’s crucial to choose the right environment for the right app. For this reason, that first step into a colo data centre is easier to swallow than a full migration onto cloud, and a good way to get started as it frees resources to plan and execute further app migration.

Security considerations should be overarching when looking at any kind of hybrid or multi-cloud solution.

Combining colo and cloud in a well-connected data centre should facilitate fast, secure, private extension between owned hardware and private and public cloud.

There is no one solution for every enterprise. Many enterprises need to be responsible for their own hardware for security and compliance reasons, making colocation and cloud not viable for certain workloads.

The key is to do an audit of your enterprise’s workloads and find the ideal solution for each – whether that’s colocation, cloud, running your own data centre, or a combination of all of the above in different measures.