(Pictured: Lex van Wyk, a managing director at Teraco Data Environments.)

One of Africa’s biggest data centre environments has been setup in South Africa by Teraco Data Environments, in a bid to establish the country as a hub for cloud services on the continent.

The South African company has data centres in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town; which together help to form the ‘Africa Cloud eXchange (ACX)' on the continent, according to Teraco managing director Lex van Wyk.

The company says that this is the "first premier grade data centre environment in Africa to provide access to a vendor neutral colocation space for sharing and selling cloud services."

The Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town data centres respectively occupy a space each of 3800 square metres, 1000 square metres and 300 square metres.

And the company has setup its cloud exchange server to attract African clients, who might be tempted to outsource their data centre requirements to Europe or the US. A lack of power supplies and infrastructure in Africa could force companies on the continent to look outside of their borders for cloud services.

But van Wyk says these organisations should rather look to keep their IT requirements on the continent, and that South Africa could be their best option.

“Instead of outsourcing to Europe, they might as well outsource to South Africa,” says van Wyk.

Moreover, van Wyk says that with the recent growth in fibre capacity along Africa East and West coasts - which connects to 28 landing points across the continent that includes South Africa - the time is ripe for such a project.

Demand for cloud services on the continent is set to increase over time, according to Dobek Pater, a partner at research house Africa Analysis, who spoke about this market to an audience at ITWeb Africa’s launch yesterday.

“Cloud services are beginning to make an appearance in some of the key African markets, but we expect another four to five years before they can be viewed as a ‘regular’ service,” he said.

He also said that other regions on the continent, apart from SA, are setting up their own data centre environments, as the past two years have seen significant growth in these facilities in markets such as Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. He added that many of these data centres in these nations are tier 2 and tier 3, and that there is the risk that an oversupply in this market could emerge.

Other risks facing Teraco’s African-wide ambitions, apart from competion from other nations on the continent, are that South Africa has experienced power shortages of its own in the last five years. The country's state-owned power utility Eskom has threatened that electricity cuts, or load-shedding, could take place this year.

Africa’s economic powerhouse was brought to its knees in 2008, when Eskom struggled to meet high demands for electricity, and carried out nation-wide power-cuts.

However, van Wyk says that his company has researched with Eskom as to where in the country there are sufficient power-supplies for data centres. He also says his company has back-up generators that are designed to kick-in in the case of a power cut.

Van Wyk added that Teraco has not signed any African clients yet, but that the company is set to go on a drive to target business on the continent.