Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has given money deposit banks in the country till 2017 to adopt tier 3 data centre standard, a global standard based on availability specifications for data centres, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can report.
The timelime has been greeted with cheers but some renowned technology experts have said that it was difficult for any bank or telecommunications operator to meet that standard in the country and urged them to consider outsourcing.
The adoption timeline was contained in a report conducted for CBN by Accenture on IT standard for banks obtained exclusively by Nigeria CommunicationsWeek.
The report was based on responses of 15 banks which include: Access, Citibank, Diamond, FCMB, First Bank, GTB, Keystone, Skye Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Standard Chartered, Sterling, UBA, Union, MainStreet and Wema Bank.
According to the report only five banks have completed the implementation of tier 3 standard of their data centres, while another five have their implementation ongoing. Yet another five are yet to commence the process of implementation.
The report also revealed that for TIA 942 standard, only three banks have completed their implementation; seven banks are yet to commence implementation process while four banks have their implementation ongoing.
TIA 942 Standard for data centres is a telecommunications standard that specifies requirements for telecommunications infrastructure and facilities of data centres.
Although, the report did not name the banks that fall in each category of the implementation, it however noted that implementing the data centre standards to the agreed tier will improve the uptime and availability of banks’ data centres which will in turn improve service availability and reduce the risk of down time.
On the scope of adoption, the report stated that ‘this standard shall be applicable to all banks and external (managed) service providers in the financial services industry.
All data centre infrastructure and facilities for the Nigerian FS industry shall satisfy the requirement for tier three’.
James Agada, chief technology officer, Computer Warehouse Group, said that the tier 3 standard prescriptions for banks to adopt was good but said it would be difficult for any bank or telecommunications operator to meet that standard in the country.
Nodding in agreement Amanda Haley, a technology strategist said that the specification of tier 3 data centre is too big and not realistic for banks to adopt.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that one of the criteria of tier 3 data centre is the ability to have two different links of the national power grid.
This is not realistic in Nigeria with only one national power grid.
Agada urged banks to outsource the standard which will allow them to host their servers and other storage facilities at data centre of third party operator mostly telecommunications operators that have what it takes to run a data centre effectively.
But Agada and Haley warned that such outsourcing model for data centres should not be driven by regulatory fiat but economic value.