The Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mal. Kashifu Inuwa has revealed what the Nigerian government is doing to ensure the country host 30 percent of its local data by 2024.
The NITDA DG, who revealed this in a keynote he delivered at a Technology Forum, organized by the Nigeria Information Technology Reporters’ Association (NITRA) with the theme: “Achieving 30% Growth In Local Cloud Hosting By 2024”, said the government is enabling the environment for hosting companies to thrive.
“The role of the Government is to enable the environment for private and corporate bodies to invest in local hosting services, the building of more data centres,” he said adding that there has been a considerable increase in the number of cloud services providers in Nigeria.
He disclosed that NITDA, whose mandate is to regulate and develop the IT sector of Nigeria has initiated several policies and programs to ensuring data sovereignty and integrity. These initiatives, according to him include the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation in 2019 and 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.
While applauding NITRA for organizing the technology Forum, Mal. Inuwa posited that data is a major factor of production but for data to be a source of wealth, it needs to be secured and have sovereignty.
He argued that though cloud computing offers other services such as Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a service, Software as a service, one of the common cloud computing services is the hosting service, which provides the opportunities for 100percent resource utilization as resources are evenly distributed over several server and cost control due to elasticity of services where pricing depends on services consumption.
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Information Technology Reporters’ Association (NITRA), said it decided to organize the Technology Forum as part of its advocacy for local cloud hosting and sovereignty.
“The NITRA’s Technology Forum is a platform designed for stakeholders in the information and Communications Technology to discuss issues that will bring growth and development to the sector,” he said.
He noted that Cloud computing is the greatest game changer since the creation of the internet and is one of the fastest growing areas of technology today, adding Cloud computing offers scalability and reliability that cannot be matched by a single enterprise.
“Today, we are talking of data protection. How can you protect data that is warehoused outside of our shores?,” he asked rhetorically while noting that local cloud hosting helps to keep our local internet traffic local as local content providers host their content in-country.
The NITRA’s Technology Forum, which was held virtual and physical was well attended by stakeholders in the public and private sector. Among them is the Minister of Communications and Digital economy, Dr. Isa Pantami; Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Mal, Inuwa Kashifu and President, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) and Managing Director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), Mr. Muhammed Rudman.
All industry Associations like ALTON, ATCON and NCS were also represented.