Minister calls for more investments in cloud computing

The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Pantami on Friday called on more indigenous Information and Communications Technology (ICT) companies to invest in Cloud Computing.

Pantami who was represented by the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Abdullahi, made the call at the 5th edition of the annual event, `Nerds Unite 2020’ organised by Mainone.He noted that ICT had taken over from oil.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that this year’s Nerds Unite 2020, witnessed the launch of local content cloud `Azure Stake’ in partnership with Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

The Cloud’s launch was announced by MDXI data centre, a subsidiary of MainOne.The minister said that in a digital economy, data was the oil, saying that ICT had taken over oil and gas with ICT being the third largest contributor to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

According to him, the five biggest companies in the world provide cloud services which are, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.”MainOne has taken the big step of involving in cloud services and that is why we are partnering with them.

”We want to have more of MainOne in Nigeria so that cloud service will be made available and our data hosted locally.”More than 90 per cent of government data is hosted locally and we are hoping to achieve 100 percent,” he said.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) MainOne, Ms Funke Opeke, in her opening speech, said the firm would be celebrating 10 years of laying cables and offering digital services in West Africa.

Opeke said government and its agencies would like to see 70 percent of Nigerians having access to broadband penetration by 2023.

She said the changes had become visible in the last 10 years, adding that what was coming would be bigger, which was the beginning of transformation technology.

According to her, content will be available locally and in local language.“Government will be online and over 100 million Nigerians will be online,’’ Opeke said.She said the future was coming and MainOne was constant and ready for the future of data centre filled with local content.

Mr Wale Olokodana, Business Group Director, Microsoft, appreciated MainOne for being at the forefront of cloud services.Olokodana in a keynote address entitled: ‘Harnessing the Power of Digital Transformation’, said that even the government had realised the power of digital economy.

According to him, it is no longer whether to use the cloud but what benefits are being gained from the cloud.He, however, highlighted some of the Azure Stack hub from MDXi as reducing time of marketing, meeting the regulatory data privacy and compliance, among others.

Mr Ernest Sales, Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) by Selectium, also said in his keynote address that MainOne had taken the mighty step to go into cloud business.

Sales said that Africa was going to be the next big thing like China that was not there 20 years ago.He said that to be able to make it, one needed a local company to be there, saying that for that, HPE was impressed with MainOne and that was the reason for the partnership.

According to him, cloud is the next big thing and nothing is going to stop it.Sales said: “Cloud has come to stay and one should move quickly and embrace the expertise the company is offering.”Nigeria is one the biggest economies in Africa and has the capacity to be bigger and companies like MainOne has the infrastructure.’’

NAN reports that `Nerds Unite 2020′ is an annual event that brought many professionals in the Information Technology (IT) industry to deliberate on innovations that would increase digital economy.