MainOne Cable, an indigenous telecoms and network solutions provider has added its voice to the call for enforcement of local content policy in Nigeria.
The Nigerian tech company, which laso owns the MainOne undersea cable says that in line with this, strict measures should be enforced for companies to host their data locally to avoid further foreign exchange losses to the country.
The call by MainOne was one of the key recommendations at the first annual summit on Data Localization organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), through the Office for Nigerian Content Development in ICT (ONC).

“It was noted that hosting Nigerian data in-country will not only be helping the country in foreign exchange conservation but would also reduce the cost of hosting data abroad, create job employment for Nigerians, increase tax revenue to government and underscore the security risk attendant in hosting sensitive data off-shore’’, MainOne says.
Vremudia Oghene-Ruemu , MainOne Data Center Product Manager notes in his presentation on Local Infrastructural Capacity on Data Hosting that the general acceptance of Internet services in solving administrative and business issues has now made data hosting inevitable.
Commercial data centers in Nigeria now offers world-class capacity to meet these requirements, according to the MainOne executive, who says that, “there is nothing available in offshore facilities that Nigerian Data Centers do not have.”
According to MainOne, “Nigeria has circa 5000sqm in Tier III DC space certified by various international organizations. Our carrier neutral data centre, MDX-I is not only Tier III and PCI DSS certified, it addition to multiple layers of security.”
“Data is the currency of an Information Society and lifeblood of any nation. We need policies to ensure that Nigeria’s intellectual property is secured”, he adds.
According to the company, MainOne is currently the largest in West Africa and recently received the Frost and Sullivan award for advanced Data Centre Infrastructure in West Africa.