EDITOR ’ S NOTE
Greetings to the readers of Intelligent CIO Africa . A benchmark of digital adoption and penetration into Africa is the extent of optical fibre and data centre investments taking place . While the West to East axis and the South axis , supported by landing points of subsea cables is taking place , the North axis is also beginning to pick up pace and take shape .
One of the most important requirement of this crisscross of network traffic and the ongoing movement of cloud regions into Africa , is optimisation of data traffic and reduction of latency due to network congestion .
A global best practice is for corporates , telecom operators , major XSPs and hyper scalers to interconnect at neutral exchange points or IXP centres . In this month ’ s lead feature , Mahen Naidu at TelCables South Africa , draws attention to the important of network peering across Africa .
Network peering is a critical , if not an essential tool in today ’ s global digital business environment . Peering through public or private agreements has become a pivotal and rapidly advancing process through which commerce and enterprises the world over can reduce latency .
Remote peering is reducing IP-Transit costs by directly exchanging traffic with peers and bypassing the need to route through distant networks and other highly congested network pathways . And by accessing larger portions of the international routing tables , businesses can reduce the complexity of their connections without compromising their network performance or reliability .
Business looking to maximise their network efficiencies need to evaluate their current network and assess where most of their data traffic is being sent or received .
And in this month ’ s cover feature , we report on how South Africa based SPAR Group has embraced modernisation of its multi-office , multi-country IT operations by introducing Copilot for Microsoft 365 and AI to transform improve employee experience , while launching e-commerce operations on SD-WAN to expand sales and store productivity with additional security .
Turn these pages to read more about the digital transformation that is taking place across Africa .
As Africa embraces digital platforms and businesses embrace digital transformation , they are challenged with the requirement of attracting , training and retaining skilled talent . What are the challenges that modern day Africa faces around technology skills and how can they manage these obstacles ? Executives from One Degree , SAS Africa , Outsized , explain further .
Wishing you the best of business success in the month ahead .
Arun Shankar Managing Editor arun @ lynchpinmedia . com
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