A leading innovative telecom services and network solutions provider, MainOne has made a case for Nigeria to host its data in-country rather than hosting them abroad which it says does not speak good of the country.
Speaking at the sidelines of the Digitization Hangout with the Digital Transformation Technical Working Groups (DTTWGs) organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in Abuja, the MainOne chief executive officer, Ms. Funke Opeke, explained that “data is the new oil” and was therefore very valuable for marketing all kinds of business development.
She stated that MainOne had entered into various strategic partnerships to make this a reality, pointing out that they have an existing partnership with NITDA focusing on bringing all of our data as Nigerians.
“MainOne is a wholesale and infrastructure service provider, we are not a retail services provider on your phone but we work with all those companies because as you know we build submarine cables that carry traffic between Nigeria and other countries and in addition we have major data centres across West Africa that house data and so that’s what you have and today you want to do a banking transaction most likely you are not going to the bank, you are doing it over your phone, where does that data reside? The data needs to reside where all the networks are.
“Whatever network that you are, if you are on MTN, Glo, Airtel you need to be able to reach that data and complete your transaction and if you want to look up something on Google, whatever device you are on, you need to be able to pull up that data.
“Partnership between MainOne and NITDA: Our focus is on bringing all of our data as Nigerians because everybody says data is the new oil data and is very valuable for marketing all kinds of business development even the storage and processing of the data like we just talked about banks and service companies, engineering companies using data, using data from the field to do analyses and make new developments we want to see more of Nigerian data as we try to expand our digital economy. We want to see more of our data resident in Nigeria and that is why we are working with the MDAs to do that and as they are working on digitization, they are making plans to host that data in Nigeria, build that capacity in Nigeria and first we are creating jobs, we are having full sovereign control of our data and Nigeria and the Nigerian economy can benefit from control of that data,” she added.
