Business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan expects the West African Data Centre Market to grow by $67.5 million in revenue by 2017.

The firm found that the West African data centre market, which covers regions like Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, grew by $29.6 million last year.

According to Frost & Sullivan its research covered co-location, web hosting, hosted security, application hosting and disaster recovery and business continuity, virtual desktop and virtual servers segments in Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal. It found that co-location and web and application hosting services were the most prevalent data centre services in the region.

The firm also found that over the past two years growth in the data centre market in West Africa was driven by the availability of bandwidth.

This is the result of infrastructural developments in the form of undersea cables and terrestrial backbones, said company officials.

Frost & Sullivan’s Information & Communication Technologies research analyst, Mervin Miemoukanda, noted that “Affordable bandwidth costs have made it feasible for service providers in West Africa to offer data centre services locally.”

“Telcos such as MTN and Vodafone have been driving the uptake of data centre services in the region, through the establishment of commercial data centre facilities, and are occupying market share leadership positions due to their extensive network infrastructure.”