Nigeria is Honeypot for Cloud Computing-NITDA

Professor Cleopas Angaye, director general, Nigeria Information Technology Development Agency (NiTDA) has said that although Nigerian economy is yet to derive full benefits of cloud computing due to multifaceted challenges, the concept holds the future for sustainable socio-economic development of the country.

Speaking at the launch of multi-tenant cloud and dynamic scalable business solution by Business Connexion in Lagos, Angaye said, unlike the Web, cloud computing is still at a comparatively early stage, giving the country a chance to act to ensure being at the forefront of its further development.

The DG hinted that the computing paradigm is expected to dominate the traditional model for enterprise application distribution and deployment worldwide.

Quoting from International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the NiTDA boss, said that the global revenue generated through public cloud in 2010 exceeded $21.5 billion.

"This figure is expected to grow rapidly withing 5-years to be $72.9 billion in 2015. This figure represents about 28% of annual growth rate and it is about 7% of the global information technolofy market or investment generally.

"In the same research finding, the adoption of cloud computing services were said to have generated more than $36 billion in 2012 as revenue simply put at about 28% of the overall industry growth rate," he explained.

He stressed that Nigeria and other developing nations are still facing challenges in full adoption of cloud computing due to, specifically, the inefficient infrastructure, cost of access to ICT products and servies.

"Findings and conclusion suggest that developing countries are likely to be attractive markets for cloud computing services and this technology will soon make positive impact on key sectors of the economy like governance, health care delivery, banking and education sectors, amongst others.

"This era is referred to as the new IT delivery model and with adequate broadband availability  in Nigeria, it will revolutionalise all industries around us. In this 'era of now', people will use the cloud for doing innovative tasks and with operational cost as one of the many features of cloud computing, old tasks can be executed in new ways," Angaye added.

Essentially, cloud computing era is characterised by on-demand self service, rapid elasticity, mulit-tenacity, resource pooling, quality of service, broad network services and pricing.