By Shamith Maharaj, Managing Executive: Data Networks at BCX

While forecasts for local economic growth are not encouraging, the IMF recently predicted GDP growth of over 6% for sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing economies this year, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, South Sudan, Seychelles and Mauritius.

It’s no wonder South African businesses are looking to expand northwards across the continent.

While growing across borders opens a wealth of new markets, it also brings with it challenges such as rolling out and managing infrastructure, logistics, HR, and payroll.

The first and most important step in expanding into new territories, however, is building foundational infrastructure. In a digital world, this means ensuring high-performance, low-latency, secure and reliable connectivity wherever branch offices are being opened, and enabling centralised visibility, management, and support.

In every enterprise, it is important to avoid silos between data stores, branches, and departments, and connect people, systems, and data with robust, fast and ultra-secure networks. This is even more important when transactions are taking place and data is being generated across multiple countries. Demands on networks will increase as organisations produce ever-larger data volumes, and harness big data analytics, IoT, AI and ML.

BCX is fast becoming recognised as the number one aggregator on the African continent, helping our customers plan, design, implement and manage their data networks from South Africa into all the new territories that they are expanding into.

We have scaled our network from a capacity and a reach perspective, as well as through our partner ecosystem, across virtually the entire continent. With 110 points of presence globally, BCX has the largest fibre network in Africa with over 167 000 km of fibre and a presence in 51 countries in Africa. This means our infrastructure is available to support organisations practically anywhere on the continent.

BCX delivers high-performance data centre interconnection services and SD-WAN services across the African continent. Our extensive network reach allows us to create cloud onramps; and our managed connectivity solutions enhance this support with proactive network management, 24-hour technical support and expert guidance.

If you have ambitions to scale your business into Africa, contact us to learn how we can simplify and expedite your cross-continental infrastructure.