Worried by continued disregard of federal government guidelines to its ministries, departments and agencies to host their data in the country, stakeholders in the data security ecosystem have urged the federal government to enact an act of parliament to support its guideline to ensure its full adherence.
This is coming against the backdrop of a revelation by Charles Bolifrank, head of sales, Sidmach Technologies at Cyber Africa Data Centre and Cloud Roundtable held in Lagos, that Sidmach managing WAEC and JAMB data host them outside of the country.
More so, Temitope Dele Oni, regional head, Lagos of Galaxy Backbone acknowledged that federal MDAs are still hosting their data outside of the country contrary to federal government guideline against such action.
Rock Adote, a software architect, frowned at the actions of federal government MDAs and called for enactment of law to support existing guidelines that will ensure that they comply by reason of law.
Reacting, Ike Nnamani, president, Medallion Communications, agreed on the need for legislation on hosting of data in-country, but preferred commercial and business need to make organisations to host in-country.
He cited the situation in financial sector where central bank of Nigeria (CBN) mandated all banks to host in-country, “but some bank in the guise of having offshore operations are still hosting outside of the country”.
“All these are happening because those MDAs feel they can get away with such flagrant disregard of government guidelines. I think value when compared to hosting outside of the country should be the determining force.
“Hosting data in-country comes with better quality of service, low latency, and makes ones data closer to him which will not be affected by internet gateway outage. Though it is cheaper to host outside because of cost of providing power, overtime this will change as more people embrace the service in-country,” he noted.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that commercial banks in the country having adopted outsourcing model are spending some $264,000 every year on hosting of their data at different tier 111 data centres in the country.
It was gathered that there are rack spaces at a typical data centre comprising of 42U and a 2U in a rack contains between 16 to 18 servers depending on their specifications, and cost $1,000 monthly to host a server at a data centre in the country.
Peter Iwegbu, managing director, Pn Consulting, and former group head, ebusiness and payment, Access bank, offering insight on hosting of server by banks, explained that banks’ servers are based on applications that the bank runs and that a typical bank in the country runs an average of 20 applications which means 20 servers.
“But today the story has changed with virtualization. This means that a bank can have one physical box with partitions inside of the box for the various applications that the bank runs. With this innovation, instead of a bank hosting 20 or more servers as the case was in the past the bank will host only one physical box reducing cost,” he added.