By our reporter
Hosting of Nigerian data and cloud services locally will save the country about $400 million (about N144billion), according to the chief Technical Officer of Medallion Communications Limited, Dr Krishnan Ranganath.
According to him the data market in Nigeria is huge and players have not been able to tap into as they should, adding that if the about $400 million worth of Nigerian data hosted abroad is brought in, the market for local players would huge.
He said that there was need for more data centres to be built in the country to add to already existing ones in Lagos and Abuja to address local hosting and local cloud service delivery
Ranganath said the call for more data centres across the country, especially in each of the states, is made more imperative due to transmission challenges with Intercity connectivity and last mile delivery challenges in Nigeria, insisting that unless that was done attaining a 100% localized cloud-based model will be difficult.
Studies, according to him, have shown that Nigeria will be spending several billions of dollars on ICT, products and services by 2019 and Cloud services play a major role, but Cloud should not be limited to Lagos which is less than 10 % of Nigeria.
He advised that the fundamental ICT infrastructure in Nigeria must grow exponentially if we are to achieve the set objective and this should be a team effort of all stakeholders in Nigeria
Ranganath noted that most critical services being used in Nigeria is hosted in the Cloud, for example AWS/Azure or any other platform, but the question is how to reach the cloud from remote locations where there is no or limited connectivity available.
He said international Connectivity was undermining development of local cloud services as nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continent to support “our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment”.
Rock Anote of Software Achitech agrees with Ranganath in the need for Nigeria data to be hosted local in the country arguing that since data hosted outside Nigeria is subject to the laws of the host country it would be difficult for Nigerian data owners to seek redress in case of infractions.
According to him Google’s in connecting the United States to Chile, home to the company’s largest data center in Latin America, same with Facebook planning of a cable to connect East Africa would affect connectivity is negatively impact the deployment of localized cloud infrastructure in a country like Nigeria
He also informed that Content providers like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon now own or lease more than half of the undersea bandwidth globally though good for places like Lagos and people can enjoy the fast access to the cloud even without deployment of localized cloud infrastructure it is Idle for these providers to have local presence in countries, and expand the network within the country to enable the users to have better experience and even more revenue generation
Ranganath says Medallions sees a potential of a minimum of 37 Data Centers in Nigeria, which will enable the dream of Cloud in Nigeria with the edge networks in place of the cloud providers, adding that to support this Medallion is building additional Data centers in Port- Harcourt, Enugu, Asaba, Kano, Ibadan as Phase 1 to be completed in 18 months other than the ongoing expansion in Lagos and Abuja, which are already operational, according to Ranganath who spoke at the Cyber Africa Data Center and Cloud Roundtable in Lagos.
He said the Enugu, Portharcourt centres would be operational in 2019 first quarter, while the Ibadan, Kano and Asaba centres would come live in the third quarter of 2019 and the Benin, Maiduguiri and Kaduna centres in first quarter of 2020.
Medallion is also in the process of building nine additional connected data centers in selected West African Countries which Include Accra, Togo, Abidjan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Niamey and Cameroon According to him Medallion operates the most prominent data centers in Nigeria, which is called Nigeria’s Telehouse and the most interconnected facility in the West African sub region, hosting the Nigerian Internet Exchange, The Nigeria .ng domain servers, all international submarine cable providers in Nigeria, all GSM, CDMA, Fixed Line, and Fixed Wireless service providers, Value Added Service Providers and Premium Rated Service providers like Google, Facebook, Orange amongst others
