• Friday, March 29, 2024
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NITDA DG commends infrastructural development at Rack Centre

NITDA DG commends infrastructural development at Rack Centre

The director-general of the Nigerian Information Technology Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has commended the massive infrastructural investment taking place at Rack Centre, West Africa’s leading carrier-neutral data centre, saying it aligns with the Agency’s objective of increasing capacity and enabling local hosting in Nigeria-based data centres.

Abdullahi, who visited Rack Centre as part of his working visit to technology-based private and public establishments in Lagos, said the Agency’s desire is that both government agencies and the private sector host locally to reduce cost.

“We are stimulating digital demand within the public sector; our regulatory activities are to help open the ecosystem. We are constantly consulting with the stakeholders to build capacity and challenge locally based technology companies, including startups, to compete internationally. To this end, Rack Centre has made Nigeria proud with the range of high profile and prestigious global awards it has received since inception, a demonstration of our world-class capability,” he said.

Rack Centre recently announced an expansion program that will increase capacity by 13 MW of IT power, in addition to the current expansion to 1.5MW of IT power due to launch in June 2021. The expansion program will bring unprecedented carrier-neutral data centre capacity to West Africa, making Nigeria a hub for digital infrastructure and carrier-neutral interconnect in the region.

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Every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa is directly connected to this Tier III certified data centre in Nigeria.

Ayotunde Coker, managing director of Rack Centre, delighted at Abdullahi’s visit, said the investment outlay “is to build state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, the leader in West Africa capable of hosting both local and international players”.

“We have achieved 100 percent uptime and the most competitive levels of data centre efficiency in a challenging climatic environment,” Coker said.

“With local infrastructure, NITDA can confidently encourage and enforce the sovereign data rules for hosting data locally and work with government stakeholders to create the policies that encourage competitive cost of capital and policies to drive the growth of digital infrastructure in the country, making Nigeria the delivery point of digital infrastructure in the emerging Africa free trade environment,” he said.