The Chief Executive Officer of Medallion Data Centres Limited, Engr. Ikechukwu Nnamani has highlighted some of the teething challenges that have continued to hinder the growth and adoption of data centre operations in Nigeria.
Engr. Nnamani, who spoke in an exclusive interview with BusinessRemarks, noted that poor implementation of policy on local hosting of data has remained a hindrance as it is presently impacting negatively on data centre operations.
“If you ask me between policy and regulation, which one has affected and impacted the data centre operations in Nigeria the most, I will say probably more of policy because the regulation is still been worked on. The data centre space is still not regulated and that’s because it’s seen as a REIT, Real Estate Investment Transaction.
“The difference between a data centre building and a hotel is just that in a hotel, people come there to sleep and in data centres, servers come there to. From that standpoint, it is all about implementing the policy on local hosting. Although, there is a policy on local hosting that is not fully implemented. There is a lot of stuff that still needs to be done from the policy standpoint,” he said.
He argued that implementing the policy on local hosting, which requires all content producers, including government agencies to host all subscriber and consumer data in Nigeria, will help drive demand as some people for whatever reason are still hosting their content outside.
Speaking on the technology that will be more relevant in the nearest future, the former President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), noted that the Internet of Things (IoT) whether by 5G is here to stay.
According to him, the Internet of Things will drive the new data regenerated and machine-to-machine data generation, which is seen to be bigger over time than human-to-human data generation. “The Internet of Things (IoT) will be the driver of these innovations and it is already here,” he said.
He however noted that IoT cannot exist without data centres. Thus, the more data centres that are available, the more internet optics services can be implemented and rolled out so that Nigeria can benefit from a smarter economy.