Owners of Micro, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprises (MSME) in Nigeria have been urged to use cloud services to boost productivity, adaptability, and innovation.
This was the viewpoint expressed by IT professionals at the webinar series hosted by Rack Centre with the subject “Promoting Cloud Neutrality: Cloud Adoption as a Cost-Effective and Efficient Direction for MSMEs.”
MSMEs are estimated to number 41 million in Nigeria, according to SMEDAN, the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria.
Indeed, the conversation about cloud adoption by businesses in Nigeria has become vital given the revolution being experienced in the digital realm, according to Senior Sales Manager, Rack Centre, Kelechukwu Nsofor, who moderated the event.
Ismaila Salami, a senior account cloud engineer at Oracle, started the discussion and examined how the digital world has changed over the past two decades.
He revealed that 50% of internal software used by organizations are still installed on-premises. He continued by saying that medium-sized businesses in particular must use the cloud as part of their infrastructure, particularly at a time when data is proliferating.
Ismaila highlighted the advantages of cloud services, pointing out that company owners have a lot to gain from constructing their infrastructure on the cloud because it provides flexibility, choices, and significant accomplishments with little work while navigating uncertainty and constructing security.
He claimed that the cloud providers now have the freedom to shift among multiple platforms without a data breach using either a multi-cloud strategy or leveraging open standards, allaying the concerns of MSMEs on vendor locking.
The majority of digitally transformed SMEs do not require cloud computing services, according to Assistant General Manager for Cyber Cloud, Laurel Onumonu, who also noted that the type of the firm or capacity decides whether cloud services would be needed.
Onumonu, who gave the cloud service providers the task of mobilising and enticing mid-sized businesses to adopt the cloud, cited a lack of awareness, capital flight, expensive prices, the lack of government support, and a lack of technical expertise as some of the problems MSMEs face when managing the cloud-based ecosystem.
Stephen Okoye, Chief Technology Officer of INQ Digital Nigeria, said that connection companies or cloud providers are increasingly stepping up to provide the necessary infrastructure for customers to access the content they typically receive from abroad. Okoye also participated in the panel discussion.
Since ISPON, Google, Microsoft, and other cloud providers entered the market, content is now easily accessible and has low latency.
“If the economies are right, there is high connectivity and good IT infrastructure. You will most likely see Rack Centre and other cloud providers have footprints in Kano, Akure, and other semi-urban cities in Nigeria. I believe that with the maturity of infrastructure, high cloud penetration, the efficiency of many organizations will improve,” he said.
The worry of numerous tenants in a data collocation center experiencing data breaches does not exist, according to Chuks Okpaka, Azure Go-To-Market Lead, Africa, Microsoft. This is because cloud service providers now have a number of safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access or data leaks.
Vice President, Infrastructure, Qore, Okey Chimeh shared his experience as a business user, noting that using cloud services has considerably increased speed and reduced costs in financial institutions. Chimeh explained that organizations now benefit from improved efficiency thanks to cloud services by citing the example of debit card issuing, which takes less than 24 hours these days.
