Connectivity and data center solutions company, MainOne, strongly believes that there are enormous opportunities for data center growth in Nigeria in spite of the limitations. Gbenga Adegbiji, General Manager of MainOne’s MDXi Data Centers, said this while speaking at the DataCloud Europe 2017 conference in Monaco this week.
He said the perspective is based on the upsurge in the use of ICT services and mobile broadband, the migration towards a digital economy with Internet underpinning a lot of services across the region, better adoption of e-Governance, e-Health and e-Commerce initiatives and businesses looking to host their growing digital information locally.
He joined an expert panel on the Africa Data Centre Leadership to discuss strategies for achieving improved Data Center and Cloud penetration across the continent. The panel started with a review of the challenges of Data Centers across the continent in comparison to other markets, highlighting low demand as the biggest constraint, due to offshore data hosting of content. With improved access to Internet services on the continent, leading content providers are finding that the high latency experienced with serving Africa from offshore does not effectively engage the market and have started establishing beachheads for content in data centers on the continent.
According to him, MainOne is anticipating the growing demand and has started building its second Tier III+ data center in Sagamu, a blooming industrial cluster in South-West Nigeria.
Adegbiji also highlighted MainOne’s efforts at improving transit traffic in Nigeria with its partnership with the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), and its new interconnection service OpenConnect, which facilitates increased interconnection, collaboration and peering for telecom operators, ISPs and content providers within its data center. According to him, this service would enhance local internet performance, lower costs and minimize traffic bottlenecks for Internet traffic in Nigeria.
