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Nigeria Will be Industrialised, Transformed Economy- Coker

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Tunde Coker, managing director of Rack Centre since July 2014 has within a short time built a reputation for innovation and the democratisation of IT business in Nigeria.
Coker, a Mechanical Engineering graduate from Glamorgan University, Wales has worked with Ford of Europe; and Cap Gemini, a global top 5 business and technology consultancy. 
During the 2000s, he held various roles; MD/CEO at an eMC Saatchi, an M&C Saatchi company, Global IT Applications Director at BP the oil major, and prior to coming to Nigeria in 2009, he was Chief Technology Officer for Criminal Justice in the UK and CIO for Ministry of Justice. 
Access Bank brought Coker back to Nigeria as Group CIO in 2009; and he was engaged on the exciting journey to transform the bank to one of the leading banks it is today.
In 2013, he left to join Emerging Markets Payments as MD West Africa.
He believes that Nigeria will be an industrialised and transformed top 20 global economy and is very pleased Rack Centre is a key part of that journey.
   

About Rack Centre
In late 2012, Jagal, a Nigerian conglomerate holding that operates leading energy businesses and manages a diverse portfolio of investments identified a significant market opportunity and potential demand for high quality, reliable, secure and scalable carrier neutral colocation space, leveraging 20,000 square metres in Oregun, 30 metres above sea level, private secure access within an industrial area and access to a wide range of utilities; an ideal location for a data centre.
The vision was for Rack Centre to be the leading data centre in Sub-Saharan Africa; delivering robust colocation services to world class standards.  A modular, off-site constructed facility was preferred for two key reasons:
1. To allow for the site to scale to meet demand over multiple phases. Modular scalability is ideal for what was a nascent market at the time and projected to grow at double digits. 
2. To provide a facility with a finished build quality to match any new build in Europe or America.
Rack Centre is built to world class standards and the first West African data centre to receive Tier III Design certification in 2014. 
It is truly carrier neutral; this means it has all the leading telecommunications providers connected, the widest choice in West Africa and more than any of the local Tier lll data centres. 
It is the primary host for the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria.  This is significant as customers located at Rack Centre have direct connection to the IXPN giving significant benefits in customer experience for Internet services.
 
Rack Centre Level of Certification and Benefits
Rack Centre is Design Certified to Tier III by the Uptime Institute, the global authority for data centre certification.  The Uptime Institute is “The Global Data Centre Authority” that facilitates and certifies data centres around the world on their reliability and uninterruptible availability.
 It also delivers due diligence assessments and certifications of site infrastructure and site management in accordance with the Tier and Operational Sustainability Standards in over 40 countries worldwide. 
Tier certification is the validation of the reliability inherent the design of the data centre.  There are four tiers of certification. 
Tier I being the lowest, Tier IV, the highest and are subject to stringent qualification criteria.  Tier III is the highest possible in most parts of the world. 
For instance, a Tier II data centre has a design downtime of 22 hours per year, a Tier III just 1.6 hours allowable.  A large difference that matters for companies that must have reliable IT. 
If the data centre is down, the business is down.  I am pleased to note that since commissioning over 24 months ago, Rack Centre has had 100% uptime.  
Tier certification is analogous to a driving licence.  It is the stamp of minimum certified proficiency.  You would not hire a driver without a driving licence, just as it is not advisable to trust critical IT assets to uncertified data centres or where the tier level does not meet your enterprise risk criteria.

Managing the Power Supply Challenge in the Country
We have designed and in place very sophisticated power architecture that is a component part of the design certification. 
At the time of commissioning we assessed and found grid utility did not meet our reliability and dependability standards.
 So we currently run on fully redundant diesel power generation.  The utility power situation has since changed and we are now implementing industrial dedicated utility power with a substation at Rack Centre.  
This will be live in Q 1 2016.  We are undergoing detailed design for gas power which will come into play in 2017 giving multiple sources of power; utility, gas and diesel. 
We may then consider getting the Tier IV certification, which may well be another first in West Africa.  Our technology is highly efficient and we achieve average Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5 compared to a typical PUE of 2.5 in the region.  This is outstanding for the local climatic conditions we have.

Some content providers as well as state governments have attributed security concerns as responsible for them hosting their servers outside. How would you react to this and does Rack centre have any security certification to address this concern?
Our data centre is designed and sited with effective security within a private estate.  There are ten (10) layers of physical security combined with both card and biometric access control devices.
CCTV monitoring of the entire facility is available 24/7/365 with six months of footage immediately available for review on request. 
This is monitored round the clock by our Command Centre.  The physical security/access control system is a major innovation on its own. The ten (10) layers of physical access control starts right from the first gate all the way to the racks combining manned gates, card access control systems, biometric access control systems and physical locks and keys that ensure that access is strictly on an “authorised-need-to-access” basis. Customers are able to limit access to racks down to individual employees. 
This gives our clients a high level of assurance that infrastructure colocated with Rack Centre “lives” in a very secure environment.  We operate the business to international security and service management standards. 
Software security is down to the responsibility of the clients, although we ensure the delivery of communications links to the racks are highly secure. 
Customers who colocate their assets at Rack Centre have been amazed at quality of installation and ongoing service, which then gives the confidence and peace of mind on the security of their IT assets.
Data centre outsourcing is a new line of business for Banks, Telcos among others. Why should a bank or any other organization consider Rack centre data centre?
A data centre is the bedrock of an organisation’s IT systems.  If the data centre is down, all systems are down, and more importantly your business. 
So CEOs want to ensure reliable data centre however, many organisations today cannot afford the huge upfront capital cost of building a new, efficient data centre to meet new demands for reliable IT. 
It takes millions of US dollars to build an efficient data centre; a key asset, but non-earning asset.  Not only does building a data centre require specialist expertise, running and sustaining the quality requires continuing focus and investment.  By outsourcing, they;
1.    Avoid immediate and future growth fixed infrastructure investments, 
2.    Have immediate access to required capacity.  Data centers can typically take up to 18 months to construct,
3.    Access to future capacity is matched by Rack Centre’s scalability to their business IT demands,
4.    Can invest capital and time into earning assets and their core business, and
5.    Option of colocating prime or disaster recovery infrastructure,
6.    Leave the growing complexity of managing power and environmental issues to data centre specialist such as Rack Centre. 
CIOs and CEOs that colocated at Rack Centre say they can sleep at night with the reliability they get from colocating at Rack Centre.
As a carrier neutral facility, the broad range of telecommunications companies connected to Rack Centre gives choice of connectivity providers to our clients.  Rack Centre is modular and highly scalable. 
The significant growth of IT and data demand means client owned data centres are reaching capacity or over loaded with the headache of having to extend their data centre facilities.
What is nature of your support in terms of tailored services to SMEs?    We work with our Reseller partners to provide hosting, cloud, managed services and connectivity. 
The hosting requirements for SMEs including cloud services can be tailored to meet individual requirements.  This is significant as it now gives SMEs access to computing resources previously beyond their reach enabling them to focus on growing their businesses.

Challenges of Operating in Nigeria
There are two key challenges; power and talent.  We address both by ensuring we put in place the right processes and focus on enterprise risk management.  I have mentioned our sophisticated power architecture. 
We have tightly managed processes in place to ensure diesel quality; have a fuel testing lab, and we test and segregate all deliveries. 
Our minimum standards are to the European and US standards of 9% and 5% maximum impurity levels respectively. 
On people, we have a high level of focus on our people development to world-class standards. 
Our staff are exposed to the same training experienced by any leading data centre provider in the world.  People and competency management is central to our core values.

Assessment of IT Regulations in the Country
We do have some regulations that support local content that are being increasingly enforced.  When we did not have the data centre quality such as Rack Centre in the country, companies that sought quality had no option but to look abroad.
At that time, insisting on local content where local quality was not there would embed mediocrity.  Now we have proven world class facility and the capacity locally, those laws can be enforced. 
We do have local manufacturing of computers and other hardware and carefully thought out policies that encourage the patronage of locally produced products should be considered. 
Not ban imports, but make local products as competitive and more attractive based on normal market forces.


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

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Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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