Bob Lafite, Managing Executive Core Infrastructure at BCX examines the importance of long-term investment into South Africa’s connectivity ecosystem
A reliable and capable connectivity ecosystem within South Africa has the potential to transform business efficiency, citizen service delivery, and drive the economy. As the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) highlights – connectivity is the backbone of digital infrastructure, providing the ‘foundation for individual and business participation in the digital economy’.
Long-term strategic investment into South Africa’s connectivity ecosystem is a commitment to accelerating this growth and ensuring that organisations have the tools they need to become more resilient and agile in a cloud-first, application-centric market.
Infrastructure investment It also changes service delivery, removing the points of friction caused by ageing infrastructure that results in critical failures, poor performance and weak stability. When infrastructure isn’t future-proof it affects users on a granular level – they can’t charge airtime, customers can’t get support, and systems go down when they are under too much pressure. Companies don’t thrive when they operate within unreliable infrastructure.
This is the reality that drove BCX to undertake extensive infrastructure modernisation over the past four years. Commencing in the pandemic – boldly undertaking transformative change at a time when most organisations were hunkering down – the BCX infrastructure modernisation project prioritised a fundamental shift towards an application-centric infrastructure.
The move was much needed. Prior to the core network upgrade project, the infrastructure was a consolidated conglomeration of networks and services from across multiple companies. When they all merged into BCX, they brought their own processes, capabilities and infrastructure into a complex web that took three years to consolidate and refine. However, some infrastructure was more than 25 years old, other solutions were limited in scale, and overall, they were not delivering optimum services to customers.
The infrastructure reboot was designed to reduce risk, enhance hardware infrastructure, and move the company away from just a pure connectivity model towards a more agile ecosystem, allowing users to connect to multiple applications and services across different data centres.
One of the priorities of the modernisation strategy was to ensure customers had peace of mind and agility around data storage and disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has become customisable, allowing for companies to locate their disaster recovery site in a different province to their main production while ensuring the sites are kept in sync. If a failure occurs on one site, companies can failover seamlessly to the other with minimal to no disruption. Configuring customers in multiple locations is seamless – customers can scale up capacity, storage, and compute on demand from any data centre at speed. Moving away from manual processes towards instant, remote-access management has meant BCX can provide customers with immediate flexibility and service delivery.
The entire modernisation project took three years across carefully managed phased approaches. The company changed the tyre on the car while it was driving – carefully installing and migrating systems without impacting customer service delivery and keeping as many services running as possible. Scheduling and planning were meticulous, and the result is a core infrastructure capable of handling intense customer demand, meeting modern business expectations, and providing backup connectivity if there’s an unexpected event.
The core network can handle the BCX strategic move towards anything as a service (XaaS), providing a reliable foundation from which products and services can be launched with ease. Connectivity, security, disaster recovery and on-demand service delivery come standard alongside extensive access to peering points across Africa. The company can also provide direct connectivity to cloud providers which streamlines speeds and enhances flexibility.
Meeting the needs of customers where they are and capable of handling the complexities of the South African environment, the BCX core network upgrade has shifted the company’s gears. Modern, application-centric, service-driven and built on an agile foundation capable of transforming XaaS and providing companies of all sizes with trusted, robust, and reliable service delivery across physical, wireless and LTE connectivity, the BCX network is built for Africa.
