Technology industry experts and stakeholders in Nigeria say that the need to take charge of gathered data in Nigeria by locally warehousing it, and the need to drive the adoption of cloud technologies by government, security agencies and indigenous businesses, has become more important now, to economic development than ever before.
Leading IT professionals from across Nigeria who converged at an event organised by Layer3, a leading IT services provider, in conjunction with VMware, a global leader in cloud computing and virtualization, discussed the benefits of data sovereignty and harnessing the power of cloud to move the country forward.
Speaking at the event, Oyaje Idoko, CEO of Layer3, explained that countries across the world were increasingly holding data generated by their citizens in data centers located within their borders. According to him, organizations in Nigeria’s public and private sectors could benefit from making a similar move.
“The whole notion about where your data resides is something we need to take very seriously,” he said. “There’s been a lot of talk about data being the new oil. If we say that data is the new oil, why would we want someone else to be in custody of our ‘oil’?” he said.
Idoko noted that the country was disadvantaged in many ways because of its failure to locate vital IT infrastructure locally. He expressed the belief that the local economy could make significant gains by leveraging home-grown IT facilities instead of relying on foreign cloud service providers.
“We see the impact of this in the amount of foreign exchange leaving the country as payment for these services. But we have the infrastructure to provide these services locally. We think it’s important to take charge of what is our own.”
In addition, he said; “We are a local company and we understand the complexities of the technology, cost, operations, support, experience and so on involved in deciding on a cloud strategy. We are available to help our clients through the decision making process so they can get more out of their CAPEX spend. What is more, we offer the flexibility to our clients to manage their workloads across multiple infrastructure with ease.”
Also, at the event, Muhammad Rudman, CEO, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, emphasized the savings that could be made by Nigeria if it utilized local data centers. He linked the high cost of internet service provisioning and user experience in Nigeria to the limited number of such supporting infrastructure within the country.
“We pay so much for internet because the cloud that supports it is not within Nigeria, but in some other country. The farther away we are from the cloud, the more it costs to access the services it supports. We can avoid these costs by hosting data locally,” he said.
Niyi Osibeluwo, head, cloud solutions at Layer3, said that the company is tackling the issues raised at the event. He revealed that Layer3Cloud, Layer3’s innovative cloud services, which runs out of multiple data centers within the country, was designed and built to help private and public sector organizations benefit from cloud services.
“Our infrastructure was designed using best-in-class technology from Vmware” he explained. “Our cloud services allow organizations to manage their virtual estates at the touch of a button. Configuration, real-time changes, capacity and pooling of resources can all be done on-demand via our secure self-management portal,” Osibeluwo said.
