Namibian telco MTC has made a substantial investment in the recently launched Huawei Cloud platform to capitalise on an increase in demand for enterprise cloud services.

At AfricaCom 2018 in Cape Town, MTC executives declined to specify the exact amount of the investment and said while its focus to date has been primarily on mobile telecommunications, the deal with Huawei enables it to integrated unified communications (UC) and fibre into its service offering.

MTC Secure Cloud service solutions is an additional range to the company's products and services' portfolio which the company believes will facilitate, manage and offer enterprises a smooth and shielded access to the digital space at an effective cost.

The company will utilise Huawei Cloud to connect local public and private businesses and government with high-speed fibre optic internet connectivity, UC and IOT.

According to MTC while Namibia's broadband market is currently dominated by mobile broadband, the MTC 4G-based broadband offering, under the Netman brand, is a major driver of growth.

Jonas Ngololo, MTC Manager Data & Value-Added services, said both mobile and fixed broadband trends indicate a need for higher speed and data connectivity in the country.

MTC's IT General Manager, Patrick Mushimba said, "Generally, it is becoming more difficult and expensive to keep up with the growing storage needs, whilst correspondingly needing to establish disaster recovery system thereto and for an enterprise to setup, an entire data centre could be double the cost if not quadruple the cost of hosting these in the cloud. For a CFO the transition of Capex to OpEx is desirable move as cloud computing shifts IT expenditure to an either flat and predictable subscription payment model or pay-as-you-go model, which is an attractive benefit especially for startups."

The traditional way of hosting data "has a very high TCO as well as inefficiency, rigidity and ineffectiveness of IT operations – a lot of things you need to manage and control, need highly skilled resources that also don't come cheap," Mushimba added.