Our History

The business behind CFTS began in Uganda in 1994, when Peter Atkin started trading independently in ICT support, repair, infrastructure, and data recovery.

In 2005, the operation was formalised as the legal entity Computer Facilities. As the business expanded beyond its original identity and developed a broader infrastructure-led direction, CFTS was established as the succeeding legal entity in 2011.

CFTS has operated under its present identity since then, while retaining the experience, client knowledge, and practical engineering approach developed from the original business.

Practical Support and Recovery

The early work centred on practical ICT support: repairing hardware, resolving software problems, recovering data, protecting systems from viruses, maintaining equipment, and helping organisations use technology more reliably.

From the beginning, solving the immediate problem often required understanding the wider environment around it. Equipment depended on software, networks, power, working conditions, and the people using the system. This encouraged a whole-system approach long before the company described it in those terms.

From Support to Infrastructure

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the work expanded into protected technical power, local-area networks, server environments, backup systems, communications infrastructure, and longer-term ICT planning.

Reliable computers depended on stable power. Networks depended on suitable cabling and physical infrastructure. Backup depended on storage, procedures, and the ability to recover. Effective support depended on documentation and on people understanding how the system had been built.

These dependencies became a defining part of how the business approached ICT infrastructure.

Larger and More Complex Environments

Through the 2000s, Computer Facilities delivered and supported increasingly complex infrastructure for commercial, institutional, development-sector, healthcare, financial, media, and security-sensitive environments.

The work included structured copper and fibre networks, communications rooms, protected power, server and storage systems, secure connectivity, technical fit-outs, operational support, documentation, training, commissioning, and handover.

Some projects involved hundreds of network outlets and fibre connections, multiple communications rooms, distributed sites, rural deployments, or systems operating under difficult environmental and logistical conditions. These projects reinforced an important lesson: standards and diagrams matter, but implementation quality, documentation, handover, and long-term support determine whether a system remains useful after the project is complete.

Rebuilding Around Long-Term Capability

Operating in a highly price-sensitive and fast-moving market also exposed the limits of services built mainly around a name, a supplier relationship, or offerings that could be reproduced quickly.

The response was to build around capabilities that required sustained investment, operational knowledge, and long-term responsibility. The business increasingly invested in its own infrastructure, technical platforms, engineering processes, documentation, and support capability.

The objective was not simply to own more equipment. It was to develop services based on systems, experience, and operational discipline that could not be reproduced overnight and that CFTS could understand and support directly.

The transition to the CFTS identity in 2011 marked this broader direction.

Hosting, Managed Platforms, and Edge Infrastructure

In 2011, CFTS began building and operating its own managed hosting infrastructure. This gave clients clearer control over performance, support, data location, backup, recovery, and service boundaries. It also extended the business from designing and supporting client infrastructure into operating platforms directly.

The hosting environment developed into a hybrid model, combining infrastructure in Uganda with international hosting options where those better fit the workload or client requirement.

CFTS also continued developing compact and resilient infrastructure suited to East African operating conditions. This included self-contained server-room concepts, high-speed internal networking, monitored cooling, redundant technical power, and systems designed to operate with available grid, generator, solar, and battery-backed power sources.

What would later be described as edge infrastructure developed naturally from this direction. CFTS was already placing systems closer to clients, combining local and international platforms, and designing around power, connectivity, data location, backup, recovery, monitoring, and support. The terminology came later; the practical direction was already established.

Continuity into the Present

CFTS now works across both physical and virtual infrastructure, but the current service model is not a departure from the company's earlier work. It is the cumulative result of solving increasingly connected technical and operational problems over time.

The technologies have changed repeatedly since 1994, but the underlying direction has remained consistent: understand the real requirement, account for the dependencies around it, build something appropriate to the operating environment, document it properly, and remain available when support is needed.