Kenya Tests Oversight of Data-Centre Facilities.

The Communications Authority of Kenya has argued that data centres sit on critical information infrastructure: they control access to physical plant, network resources and customer data, and should be overseen in a manner comparable to tower companies. The proposed licence borrows duties written for national communications networks — interconnection, emergency traffic, site access and continuity.

That is a live question for anyone designing or constructing a data hall in East Africa. Power, cooling and physical security still have to be engineered; the new overlay is how the facility is classified, licensed and inspected once it is live.