Safaricom’s Limuru Data Centre: Powering Kenya’s Digital Future

In the digital age, the ability to make a call, get on a website, make a payment and send a WhatsApp message has become like breathing – you only realise how necessary it is when it becomes difficult.

At a walled-off compound in the chilly hills of Redhill in Limuru, a team from Safaricom and its suppliers is manning a new facility established to ensure that Safaricom’s customers continuously have all the connectivity they need.

The new facility is a Tier 3+ data centre, one of three planned over the long term. The first phase of the first one has just been completed.

I’m proud of the team. This is just equipment, but there’s a human aspect to it. The dedication that we had from all the various teams, including the person who was doing the masonry, to the person who was doing the electrical wiring, every single individual, including the Mama Mboga who used to bring food to the construction people. It was quite a consolidative effort. We had long nights, bitter meetings, but we came up stronger and wiser.

– Maxwell Ndei, the Program Manager, Safaricom PLC

At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organisations use to house their critical applications and data.

Due to data’s sensitivity and volume, its storage is crucial, and IT infrastructure must be able to cope with current and future growth to provide consistent levels of high-level performance.

With the new data centre, said Joshua Ogoti, who is the Principal Engineer in charge of delivering the project,

A customer gets stability and resilience for services like M-PESA, whereby they can be able to do many more transactions per second seamlessly.

We have automated systems so customers can be able to make queries as well as get solutions at the touch of a button.

– Joshua Ogoti, Principal Engineer in Charge of Delivering the Project

Safaricom’s decision to own the land where the Data Centre is located and its choice of the serene Limuru neighbourhood were strategic to meet Kenya’s data privacy and data security regulations and to also cater to environmental consciousness.

Data centre tiers are a standardised ranking system issued by the global Uptime Institute that indicates a data centre’s reliability and performance. The lowest tier is 1, and the highest is 4.

Ranked at Tier3+, the Safaricom Data Centre boasts an uptime of 99.982% as well as cooling systems that can handle high-capacity racks therefore meeting the standards of hyperscalers’ like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and many others.

When we call it world class, we’ve already been tested in terms of best practices and industry standards, and that means we play in the same league with Google and Microsoft.

– Esther Karuga, Senior Manager and Overall Lead, Limuru Data Center