Digital content owned by Disney are stored on a data center near or on their Burbank California campus. That data center is likely owned and operated by a company like Google or Microsoft. Disney doesn't want to own or know about their own data center. They might have owned their own 20 year ago, but not now.
When this digital media is requested from outside the US, the content is routed to the One Wilshire Blvd data center and from there to a hub data center closer to the customer. A portion of the Disney content viewed by Kenyans will be sent to a closer data center, perhaps in Australia, and from there a portion sent to Kenya and cached in a local data center in Kenya to improve response time.
Kenyan firms, like the government telecom company, built limited data center capacity for their own customer's needs, but not nearly enough.
American companies Microsoft and Digital Realty have greatly expanded the availability of new data centers in Kenya to meet their customer's needs, sometimes in cooperation with a local partner. Kenyan firms like the local telecom company, just like Disney, will often find it more cost effective to upgrade to paying an American firm to host their data center needs, rather than managing their own center.
Americans use a data center close to where they're located, both for security and response time - so do Kenyans.
Americans need a lot of data centers, so they're built. There's not too many Kenyan firms building data centers in America.
Data centers built in Kenya are used to meet the needs in Kenya. As Kenya needs more data centers, they'll build and "hog" more data centers. |
