What's made the difference in Kenya? "Affordable connectivity has allowed banks to interconnect branches, set up terrestrial links and VPNs, wrote Wanjiku, "which were more expensive when the country was relying solely on satellite connectivity." "Smaller players unwilling to invest huge amounts of money on hardware (servers, storage, networking) and software (generic applications like ERP, CRM) can now lease capacity and access software under a pay-as-you-go model," added Hook.

But Hook cautioned it's not all rosy. The core challenge, he said, is in the critical mass needed by hosting service providers to recoup their investment costs in order to be competitive like the US and Europe, which means that Kenyan data centers may not attract many customers beyond the corporate sector. Power outages and frequent fiber optic cable cuts have also made selling data center services harder.