AccessKenya takes on its rivals with Sh30m data centre upgrade

AccessKenya is upgrading its data centre at a cost of Sh30 million to expand its capacity and bring it at par with its rivals such as Safaricom.

Jonathan Somen, the company’s chief executive officer, said yesterday the move is part of a progressive plan to optimise functions of the data facility.

“With these upgrades, we will now be at par with Tier One Service Providers around the world and this gives our clients confidence that their data is safe with us,” said Mr Somen.

“We have invested heavily in building the right infrastructure so that we can incessantly support the critical services on our network and give our customers a better experience.”

The firm is also banking on offering services such as video conferencing to improve its profitability that has been on a downward trend.

This has mainly been due to stiff competition from new entrants in the data market like mobile service providers, who are not only targeting its core clients like banks and parastatals with data storage facilities but have also started offering other outsourced services such as software development.

To remain competitive AccessKenya has in the recent years expanded its product portfolio to include a wide range of information technology services such as data backup, disaster recovery, remote assistance and inter-branch connectivity.

The company has also adopted a new data authentication system to protect Internet users on its network from imminent threats posed by cyber crime that have become rampant in the recent years.

The system, which is a set of extensions to the Domain Name System (DNS), is dubbed Domain Name System Security Extension and will protect the firm’s DNS infrastructure against cache poisoning, spoofed updates, corrupt data and what is commonly referred to as “man-in-the-middle attack”.

DNS is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.

It associates assorted information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities.

“This technology allows for digitally signed answers. This means that a client will be able to discern the authenticity of information received and the information on the authoritative DNS server,” he explained.