DATA CENTRES - A NEW PROPERTY REQUIREMENT

Abstract

The rapid growth of e-businesses has fuelled the demand for data centres which are buildings that house and maintain servers and telecommunications equipment for companies engaged in e-commerce. Data centres are part of a general trend towards application outsourcing to applications providers, such as an application service provider (ASP). The objective of the study is to explore the property requirements and location of data centres through a questionnaire survey. Purposive sampling was employed in an attempt to draw a sample of 120. The study finds that tenants require a comprehensive suite of features including security systems, uninterruptible power supply, fire protection systems, continuous monitoring, cooling systems and proactive maintenance to locate their computer operations in a data centre. Low rent is the least important consideration for the tenants. Some other features deemed to be important by tenants include good communications connectivity (networking facilities/ infrastructure), stable and fast uplink with multiple redundant lines as well as the location of the data centre. The findings imply that data centres are becoming increasingly popular for their service provision, especially among small e-businesses which prefer to outsource their IT needs for economic reasons. Also, research indicates that data hosting is a global industry, and companies and their data centres do not have to co-locate in the same country. As ebusiness continues to grow, so will the importance and demand for data centres.