Worried about the low volume of local cloud hosting among the 11 local data centres in the country, industry stakeholders have suggested new measures through which Nigeria could achieve 30 per cent growth in local cloud hosting by 2024.
The stakeholders who spoke at the recent cloud technology forum, organised in Lagos by the Nigerian Information Technology Reporters’ Association (NITRA), expressed concern that the economy may continue to loose huge revenue, when organisations and government agencies bypass local cloud data hosting companies, to host their data abroad, despite the fact that such data was generated locally in Nigeria.
The President, Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria, Mr. Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu, who expressed concern over the low patronage of local data hosting companies in Nigeria, said: “Nigeria has 11 data centres that are currently expanding into cloud hosting, yet they are underutilised because of poor patronage.”
In his keynote address, the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, said although the indices for data hosting patronage remained low, Nigeria could still up the game and achieve 30 per cent growth in local cloud hosting by 2024, should the right measures be put in place.
Listing measures on how to achieve 30 per cent growth in local cloud hosting by 2024, Abdullahi said cloud hosting would provide the opportunities for 100 per cent resource utilisation if resources were evenly distributed over several server and cost control and pricing addressed.
According to him, “The big data analytics market is set to reach $103 billion by 2023. In 2019, the big data market grew by 20 per cent. In 2020, every person-generated 1.7 megabytes in just a second and internet users generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. NITDA has initiated several policies and programs to ensuring data sovereignty and integrity.
“We introduced the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation in 2019. The successes of the regulations are there for all to see. Also, we developed the Nigeria Cloud Computing Policy (NCCP) to promote “Cloud First” as a proposition to Federal Public Institutions (FPIs) and SMEs as an efficient way of acquiring and deploying computing resources for better and improved quality of digital services.”
On his part, the Chairman of the forum, who doubles as the Chief Executive Officer, Internet eXchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), Mr. Muhammed Rudman, said: “Local hosting is critical for any country that wishes to develop its internet infrastructure and empower its citizens as well as ensure national data sovereignty.
“Nigerian government realisation of the cloud localisation brought about the National Cloud Computing Policy by NITDA in 2019, which is aimed at promoting the migration of National Data to local cloud with a goal of achieving 30 per cent by the end of 2024.”
He said local hosting in Nigeria would reduce the huge capital flight, which would lead to higher quality of service as local hosting enables websites run about three times faster than those hosting overseas because of ultralow latency.
Also, MD/CEO, Cloudflex, Mr. Aderemi Adejumoh, said a 30 per cent increase in local hosting would increase Nigeria’s the revenue by between $30 million to $150 million (N15 billion – N75 billion).
“Development and advancement in technology and Cloud computing will accelerate Nigerians reginal relevance and more importantly the leadership of Nigeria in the region and Africa at large,” Adejumoh said.
The Chairman of NITRA, Mr. Chike Onwuegbuchi, said the forum was designed for stakeholders in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, to discuss issues that would bring growth and development to the sector.
“Cloud computing has been described as the greatest game changer since the creation of the internet and is one of the fastest growing areas of technology today.
“It can be simply defined as renting time on a computing infrastructure over the internet, rather than building from the ground up. Cloud computing offers scalability and reliability that cannot be matched by a single enterprise,” Onwuegbuchi said.
Source: Thisday
