At a press conference held today at AfricaCom, Nic Rudnick, CEO of The Liquid Intelligent Technologies Group, outlined the company’s expansion of its fibre network in South Africa and announced that CrashPlan, its backup and restore service, is now available to businesses across Africa.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies will be investing around R250 million (US$ 17.5 million) in laying new fibre in South Africa’s northern provinces, providing connectivity to the major cities and towns. Wholesale capacity will be available to mobile and fixed-line operators, other service providers and businesses of all sizes.
The new fibre will be integrated with Liquid Intelligent Technologies’s existing fibre network in South Africa, which stretches from Pretoria to the Zimbabwean border – and then with its pan-African fibre network, which now covers more than 20,000km across multiple country borders and connects onto the five main subsea cable systems landing in Africa.
In addition to this network expansion, Nic Rudnick also announced that CrashPlan for Africa is now available across the continent.
CrashPlan for Africa is the most sophisticated and reliable back-up and restore data service available in Africa and is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It enables businesses to overcome the problems caused by devices being damaged, stolen, lost or sabotaged. It has been specifically developed to protect end-user data on endpoint devices – such as the desktops and laptops of every employee within a company – in a single repository.
CrashPlan for Africa was launched in Zimbabwe earlier in the year and is now available across Africa. Features and benefits include:
- Cloud choice – CrashPlan data can be stored in a number of ways: at a customer’s premises; in specialist servers provided by CrashPlan; or in the cloud at one of Liquid Intelligent Technologies’s storage nodes hosted in its world-class data centres, including the award-winning high security East Africa Data Centre in Nairobi.
- End-to-end security – All data is encrypted before leaving the device and stays encrypted in-transit and at rest. Businesses keep the encryption keys, making it impossible for unauthorised access.
- Simplified management tools – No IT knowledge is required to retrieve data from old or stolen devices and install on new devices. It is easy to add new devices to the service.
- 24/7/365 customer support from service centres across Africa.
- Data gets continuously and silently backed up.
- Easy to scale as businesses grow and their data increases.
Nic Rudnick said “African businesses need to be more sophisticated in their use of technology. They need to protect their data, especially given that so much of it now resides on their employees’ devices. The cost of recovery services in Africa has traditionally been high. However, CrashPlan for Africa provides a service which is cost-effective and extremely easy to install and manage.”
Liquid Intelligent Technologies has been shortlisted five times at this year’s AfricaCom awards, which “showcase, acknowledge and give thanks to the best performing and most beneficial telecoms and ICT innovations for communities across Africa”.
This year’s categories honour all that is best in digital Africa and, according to the organisers, attracted a plethora of entries of an extremely high standard.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies has won a number of AfricaCom awards in the past. This year the company submitted five entries into five separate categories with a 100% success rate in being shortlisted.
