Comercio has launched the first enterprise Public cloud platform in Nigeria. Their vision is to create a public cloud platform for medium and large enterprises and to provide the same services as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services here in Nigeria.
With the economic challenges faced worldwide and. especially in Nigeria, companies are looking to reduce their expenditure whilst trying to grow their business, global best practise is that most CIOs are moving to cloud platforms for data storage. With the reduction in recent times with the cost of accessing internet services, this service has not come at a better time with more world class data centres to host cloud platforms available today than ever before in Nigeria.
Speaking at the event, the Chief Technical Officer, Mr. Aderemi Adejumo, stated that ‘’Comercio Public cloud platforms offers enterprises the opportunity to move their IT expenditure from a CAPEX to an OPEX as well as only pay for what they consume. It is a perfect pay-as-you-go model to minimise expenditure and create great savings’’
He added that ‘’The other great advantage is their time to market. In traditional computing, it takes 4 – 16 weeks to request, get appropriate approvals and procure hardware before installing and configuration of the software. In this current fast changing world this is not acceptable and a great challenge. With our public cloud platform, the required hardware can be provisioned and available in less that 48 hours. With the flexibility, agility and expansion potential, our clients do not need to have an accurate estimation of growth and sizing. In a public facing service delivery this is crucial as an inadequately sized infrastructure will guarantee failure whilst an overspeed infrastructure will be a waste of funds’’
The Managing Director of Comercio Cloud, Mrs Adeyegbe also stated that ‘’they have a number of advantages over the notable foreign cloud platforms. Their platform has a lower latency than offshore platforms. It takes on average less than 25% of the time to retrieve data from an offshore cloud platform’’ In addition she said that ‘’the company provides a bespoke service, which means that they engage their customers and guide their request to the most optimum solution on their platform. They also accept payment in our local currency, which means that there is a stability in payments and in the event of a dollar fluctuation, there would be no anxiety of exceeding the budget. We meet the requirements for data localisation and if there are regulatory or compliance reasons for the data to be onshore they are compliant. In addition we meet the requirements for data sovereignty and in the event of a dispute or legal issue, they are bound by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’’
Overall there is a greater peace of mind on a local cloud platform and from our local economy point of view, it reduces capital flight and encourages job creation.
There has been and there continues to be more world class data centres coming on to the market. It provides an adequate platform for them to build a Public cloud platform. They use at least two of the Data centres to provide redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities. Using VMware technology, they are able to move their cloud infrastructure from one location to another in the event of a failure with little or no data loss.
Another important aspect of the cloud platform is security. They have a very sophisticated security setup that has a granularity that cannot be replicated affordably on a physical platform. The configuration of a centralised storage point for all the data means that it is much safer to secure and to track the access and usage of the data.
Comercio Public cloud adheres to international standards like PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data security standards), ISO 27001, (Information security management system) and ISO 9001 (Quality management system).
Their portfolio of products includes provided VM, (Virtual machines) and are able to provision a virtual server with public and private IP addresses. They also provide Backup as a service and have a platform that provides backup and recovery services. In addition, they take away the mundane and the monotony of taking the daily backups and provide an offsite recovery location. Storage is also provided as a service, this is a repository to store your data in the cloud. This is very useful for storing CCTV footage for example, especially where there is a regulatory requirement for a retention period. They provide archiving as a service which is a cold storage solution for archival data and this platform allows companies to digitise and store data electronically and free space in their offices of cold data, while still maintaining the ability to lookup and retrieve the data. DR is a service provided, where they provide a backup to a company’s IT infrastructure such that in the event of failure they are able to provide access to the company’s data with minimum or no losses. They also provide a hybrid cloud where a company with an in-house private cloud could lease resources from them to complement their infrastructure requires whether on demand or for a particular event or occasion.
