Govts, MDAs Shun .ng, Host Servers Abroad

Most of the federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are currently hosting their webs and emails’ servers outside of the country, thereby making a mockery of the government directive to register their websites with the country’s top level domain name .ng.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that some of the MDAs which previously hosted their web and email servers in the country, had to relocate to foreign countries, citing trust issues as reason.

Among the MDAs whose website servers are hosted abroad to include, cbn.gov.ng which is hosted in USA, Ferma.gov.ng hosted in UK;  National Health Insurance Scheme nhis.gov.ng hosted in USA;  efcc.gov.ng hosted in USA;  nuc.ed.ng hosted in UK;  pfp.gov.ng hosted in USA;  federal ministry of finance fmf.gov.ng hosted in USA; and  ncc.gov.ng hosted in USA, among others.

Mrs. Mary Uduma, president, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) decried this situation stating that it is inimical to capacity building and infrastructure development of the country.

According to her, “local content in information and communications technology will not grow and we must do something to arrest this situation”.

She noted that hosting servers outside of the country does not make economic sense as those MDAs pay in foreign currency there by depilating the country’s foreign exchange.

She added that minister of Communications Technology who has been in the fore-front of campaign of promoting local content frowns at this development and has been making effort to ensure that they relocate their servers to the country.

‘If they can’t patronize commercial data center operators, Galaxy backbone has cloud services that can host servers of federal MDAs. We need proactive action in this regard such as memo to federal executive council on the need for federal MDAs to relocate their website servers to Nigeria.”

Uduma also decried the lack of competitiveness in the local data centre business in Nigeria as a factor that may affect people planning to relocate their server to Nigeria.

Engr. Sam Adeleke, chief executive officer of Steineng Nigeria Ltd and immediate past president, Internet service providers association of Nigeria (ISPAN), identified some reasons why federal MDAs and others preferred hosting their servers abroad which include cost, according to him, it is cheaper to host abroad because power, security and bandwidth contribute to high cost in Nigeria.

Another factor he said is multiplicity of location of server, where most of the hosting companies abroad provider multiple location in case there is disaster in one location they will move to another location without their customers suffering downtime.

He added that continuity of business in Nigeria is not certain because of harsh business environment. ”Suggesting Galaxy backbone as alternative is risky because in as much as it is owned by government there is no guarantee that it will not collapse one day, as government is not good business man,” he said.

Mr. Timitope Osunrinde, marketing supervisor, MainOne Cable company, said that there are data centres in the country that are certified tier 111, of which MainOne MDX-i is one of them that can host website servers.

He said MainOne data centre is one of the most connected data centers in the world, because it has submarine cable connected to it.

He noted that MainOne data center was built in-line with PCI DSS and ISO 27001 standard to guarantee security and wondered why Nigerians should host their website servers abroad when there are data centers locally which are of international standard.