East Africa Data Centre (EADC) in Nairobi has been granted an Uptime Institute Certification establishing it as a Tier 3 data centre.

This comes after the company established a US$5 million electricity sub-station to boost its uptime capabilities.

Speaking at East Africa Com in Nairobi, Dan Kwach, EADC General Manager, says that the new certification puts the facility in a position to host critical and sensitive data in the country just like the global giants, Amazon or Rackspace.

"What we are announcing today is our readiness to host public cloud services. There has been a presumption that Africa does not have industry standard data centres. With our announcement today we are telling the market that Kenya is ready to host these content service providers," said Kwach.

"We are meeting a standard not only set by ourselves, but by the standards set by an accredited institution," he added.

Uptime Institute Professional Services is the only firm in the world licensed to rate and certify designs, constructed facilities and ongoing operations against its classification system and operational sustainability criteria, to deliver stamps of assurance that the site management and processes are delivering the guarantee of 100% uptime. Tier 3 includes concurrent maintainability.

Liquid Telecom's CTO Ben Roberts told ITWeb Africa that this achievement by its subsidiary will enable the company to compete with international cloud players in terms of latency, service quality and cost.

Roberts alluded to the fact that the African marketplace is opening up to more cloud players and in less than a year, big international cloud companies could make major regional announcements.

With this anticipation, EADC is readying itself to compete fairly and offer world hosting standards.

"We are ready for global internet companies to come in Africa. We are also ready to service our Kenyan clients including banks and other institutions," Roberts said.

Roberts said that infrastructure, network provision and hardware have a global average cost and there is no huge difference in hosting data in Kenya as opposed to North America or Europe.

EADC remains the largest carrier-neutral data centre hosting the Kenya Internet Exchange Point.