The November edition of EngineerIT has just been published with articles covering the wide spectrum of IT and electronics. Here is a summary of some of the great reads.

Enabling digital transformation across Africa

Teraco has completed its significant Cape Town hyperscale data centre campus, built to satisfy the growing need for interconnection and digital transformation across the continent. As Africa’s largest vendor-neutral data centre and interconnection services provider, with the completion of Phase 1 of CT2 in Brackenfell, Cape Town, Teraco is now operating the largest data centre in the Western Cape. The new facility supports the growing demand by both cloud providers and enterprises for data centre capacity. CT2 offers highly resilient and secure co-location facilities in line with Teraco’s long-term vision of enabling digital transformation across the African continent.

But what if something happens to your backups?

Data backups are essential. Most businesses are aware of this, and many keep a second and even third copy of their data in a different location. The issue is that this secondary location is often in the same vicinity as the primary data source. But what if something happens to your data centre? What if you are physically unable to access your data due to external factors like a Covid-19 lockdown or rioting? Keeping backup data at the same location as primary data is a risk to business. Offsite data backup has become essential to help businesses safeguard data against loss and be able to recover in the face of a range of different challenges. 

The power of Blockchain

In today’s digital world, where faxes have all but been replaced by email and landlines by smart phones, doesn’t it seem strange that we’re still signing contracts in person? That we’re driving hours to do so, creating mountains of paper trails, and storing them in lever arch files to gather dust, when the technology exists to eliminate this physical burden? Blockchain has been proven to solve this problem, yet its business adoption has been slow. The technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. It’s time for the way we do administration to change.

Coding Unplugged!

In light of the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the shortage of relevant skills in South Africa, the government is actively driving the introduction of coding and robotics in schools from Grade R onwards. An investigation of the published draft curricula shows a heavy reliance on the availability of computers, other technologies (e.g. robots, circuits), as well as teachers with a solid understanding of topics such as coding and electronics. For industry it is critical that the teaching of coding in schools is a success, cultivating the skills pipeline into higher education, and thus increasing the number of software developers desperately needed by our economy.

Small but mighty NASA weather instruments prepare for launch

Working together, two instruments could open the door for a more efficient, cost-effective way to gather key information for weather forecasting. Two instruments launching to the International Space Station in a few weeks could be weather forecasting game changers. The two novel  instruments are expected to demonstrate that while they are much smaller, much lighter and much less expensive than weather satellites orbiting today, they can collect some of the same essential data. The main purpose of the Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR) instrument is to measure the direction and speed of winds at the ocean surface. The Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems (TEMPEST) looks at atmospheric humidity. Designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the two instruments are technology demonstrations. NASA will archive the data and make it available to all interested users, but the main purpose of the mission is to prove the instruments can operate in space and supply data for weather forecasts. Together, they’re part of a U.S. Space Force mission called Space Test Program-Houston 8 (STP-H8), expected to launch to the space station on 21 December 2021.

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