Teraco is Africa’s leading data centre provider, serving hyperscalers, cloud platforms, and major enterprises. To meet rising customer expectations for transparency, energy data, and real-time operational visibility, Teraco needed a secure and scalable way to share telemetry such as power usage, cooling performance, and environmental metrics with external clients. The company selected HiveMQ Cloud to build a multi-tenant, event-driven telemetry data streaming service that maintains complete isolation between internal systems, tenants, and users.
The Need for Real-Time Transparency in Modern Data Centres
Teraco needed to securely and efficiently distribute real-time telemetry to two external customers, but existing API and polling approaches were slow, resource-intensive, and difficult to secure.
“We had a hyperscale client requiring minute-level monitoring of white space and support equipment across geographically distant sites,” said Bernard Van Der Westhuizen, Energy Efficiency, BMS Manager at Teraco.
Telemetry categories such as the alarming of critical equipment, along with power, cooling, and environmental data, are especially valuable to clients because they provide assurance of strict white space SLA adherence. Real-time visibility into these metrics demonstrates Teraco’s ability to maintain well-managed facilities and consistently meet environmental and operational SLAs.
The use case required real-time, scalable, and secure data transmission with absolute guarantees of network and tenant isolation. Teraco sought a data streaming and intelligence solution that would provide:
Real-time telemetry across distributed data centre campuses
Guaranteed strict tenant isolation, preventing customers from accessing internal systems or other tenants’ streams
Easy scale to additional customers, without re-architecting internal systems
Building a Secure, Multi-Tenant Telemetry Backbone with HiveMQ Cloud
Teraco deployed HiveMQ Cloud to create a secure, scalable data backbone for all external telemetry. The platform is cloud-hosted at a third-party location, avoiding any API exposure to internal systems. It handles telemetry streams from infrastructure sensors and energy meters, using topic segregation and TLS-secured communication.
HiveMQ’s enterprise-grade access control and Enterprise Extensions allowed Teraco to manage separate tenant connections, define publishing rights, and bridge future systems as needed. Clients receive their required data in real time (minute or hourly) through lightweight, low-bandwidth MQTT messages.
The architecture is scalable, tenant-isolated, and compliant with Teraco’s security posture. Teraco added HiveMQ’s Enterprise Security Extension to enforce TLS encryption and client-specific ACLs, and the Bridge Extension to enable future broker federation and staging-to-production mirroring.
The publish–subscribe model also externalizes data collection, eliminating the need for the previous API process that required entering the Teraco environment. Data is now pushed rather than polled, improving control, reducing overhead, and strengthening security. Today, Teraco streams approximately 36,000 data points per minute, more than 2.16 million per hour, through the HiveMQ Cloud platform.
As a result, each customer receives a fully isolated MQTT data stream, ensuring total separation and including environmental, electrical, and mechanical data. This approach allows Teraco to offer a high-value telemetry service while protecting its environment and simplifying operations.
Strengthening Client Trust and Data Centre Resilience
Teraco’s HiveMQ-powered platform has become the new standard for customer data services, unifying industrial telemetry and energy reporting in a highly secure, multi-client environment. It successfully bridges two very different data-sharing requirements - hyperscale facility monitoring and energy reconciliation - through a single unified platform.
Strict tenant isolation is fully auditable and reinforces client trust. Real-time telemetry also helps customers validate SLA adherence and understand Teraco’s operational resilience. For example, during South Africa’s 2022–2023 load-shedding events, live telemetry helped demonstrate Teraco’s ability to maintain stability under challenging conditions.
“The transparency provided by real-time telemetry enabled by HiveMQ proves beyond any doubt that Teraco meets and exceeds all SLA conditions,” said Van Der Westhuizen. Clients can immediately see environmental conditions, track operational performance, and observe Teraco’s real-time response to any unexpected events.
With minimal operational overhead, the fully isolated, scalable telemetry service now acts as a model for onboarding future clients. HiveMQ enables Teraco to offer a highly transparent, data-driven experience - strengthening partnerships, increasing operational efficiency, and enhancing the value of its data centre services.
