For Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Kashifu Inuwa, the vision behind Nigeria’s newly signed National Sovereign Cloud initiative was designed to strengthen the country’s digital self-determination, localise critical infrastructure and position Nigeria as a digital gateway for West and Central Africa. In this interview, he also addressed the need to build local cloud capacity, reduce capital flight, create jobs and make digital services more affordable for Nigerians, as well as the safeguards being put in place to ensure resilience, cybersecurity and digital trust. Precious Ugwuzor brings excerpts
Can you give us a broad overview of the vision that led to the National Sovereign Cloud initiative signed recently? What was the driving condition
To keep it simple, the vision is to develop capacity for digital self-determination. This journey started in 2019 when we issued the “Cloud First policy”. At the time, every ministry and MDA was building its own silo data center. The operational cost was huge. So in 2019, we came up with a policy to discourage MDAs from building silo data centers and instead use cloud services. Cloud is cheaper, easier, and you can scale quickly. With on-premise infrastructure, you have to replace everything when it reaches end-of-life.
