Read time: 3 minutes

Nigeria’s IT agency taps into Rack Centre infrastructure investment

By , ITWeb
Nigeria , 25 May 2021
Director General, NITDA, National Technology Regulatory Agency Kashifu Abdullahi, visited Rack Centre.
Director General, NITDA, National Technology Regulatory Agency Kashifu Abdullahi, visited Rack Centre.

Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, Director General of the National Information Technology Agency, NITDA, has paid tribute to Rack Centre, West Africa-focused carrier neutral datacentre for its ongoing infrastructure investment.

According to a statement released by Rack Centre, NITDA said the investment aligns with its objective to increase capacity and enable local hosting in Nigeria-based datacentres.

Abdullahi, who visited Rack Centre as part of his working visit to technology-based private and public establishments in Lagos, said the Agency's desire is that both government agencies and the private sector host locally to reduce cost.

He said: “We are stimulating digital demand within the public sector; our regulatory activities are to help open the ecosystem. We are constantly consulting with the stakeholders to build capacity and challenge locally based technology companies, including start-ups, to compete internationally. To this end, Rack Centre has made Nigeria proud with the range of high profile and prestigious global awards it has received since its inception, a demonstration of our world-class capability."

Rack Centre recently announced an expansion program that will increase capacity by 13 MW of IT power, in addition to the current expansion to 1.5MW of IT power due to launch in June 2021.

The expansion program will bring unprecedented carrier neutral data centre capacity scale to West Africa, creating Nigeria as a hub for digital infrastructure and carrier neutral interconnect in the region. Every country on the Atlantic coast of Africa is directly connected to this Tier III certified data centre in Nigeria.

Managing Director of Rack Centre, Dr Ayotunde Coker, said the investment outlay "is to build state of the art digital infrastructure, the leader in West Africa capable of hosting both local and international players. We have achieved 100% uptime and the most competitive levels of data centre efficiency in a challenging climatic environment. With local infrastructure, NITDA can confidently encourage and enforce the sovereign data rules for hosting data locally and work with government stakeholders to create the policies that encourage competitive cost of capital and policies to drive the growth of digital infrastructure in the country, making Nigeria the delivery point of digital infrastructure in the emerging Africa free trade environment."

Daily newsletter