NiRA Decries Govts, MDAs Hosting .ng Servers Abroad

Mary Uduma, President, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) has decried the situation where most of the federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are currently hosting their webs and emails’ servers outside of the country.
Uduma said that the situation negate the government directive to register their websites with the country’s top level domain name .ng, stressing that it is inimical to capacity building and infrastructure development of the country.
Daily Times gathered that some of the MDAs which previously hosted their web and email servers in the country had to move to foreign countries, citing trust issues as reason.
Investigation also revealed that the MDAs whose website servers are hosted abroad include, Central Bank of Nigeria, cbn.gov.ng which is hosted in USA; Ferma.gov.ng hosted in UK; National Health Insurance Scheme, nhis.gov.ng hosted in USA; Economic and Financial Crime Commission, efcc.gov.ng hosted in USA;  National University Commission, nuc.ed.ng hosted in UK;  pfp.gov.ng hosted in USA;  federal ministry of finance, fmf.gov.ng hosted in USA; and   Nigerian Communications Commission, ncc.gov.ng hosted in USA, among others.
She lamented that hosting servers outside of the country does not make economic sense as those MDAs pay in foreign currency there by depilating the country’s foreign exchange.
“Local content in information and communications technology will not grow and we must do something to arrest this situation,” she said.
She commended the effort of the minister of Communications Technology for her campaign at promoting local content and has been making effort to ensure that they relocate their servers to the country.
In her words: If they can’t patronize commercial data center operators, Galaxy backbone has cloud services that can host servers of federal MDAs. We need proactive action in this regard such as memo to federal executive council on the need for federal MDAs to relocate their website servers to Nigeria.”
She explained that the lack of competitiveness in the local data centre business in Nigeria is a factor that may affect people planning to relocate their server to Nigeria.
Chief Executive Officer,  Steineng, Engr. Sam Adeleke, Nigeria Ltd and immediate past president, Internet Service Providers Association Of Nigeria (ISPAN), noted that cost, power, security and bandwidth  which contribute to high cost in Nigeria are some of the reasons why Federal MDAs and others preferred hosting their servers abroad, since it is cheaper to host abroad.
He maintained that abroad there is multiplicity of location of server, where most of the hosting companies provide multiple locations in case there is disaster in one location they will move to another location without their customers suffering downtime.
He opined that continuity of business is not certain in Nigeria because of harsh business environment. ”Suggesting Galaxy backbone as alternative is risky because in as much as it is owned by government there is no guarantee that it will not collapse one day, as government is not good business man,” he said.
Marketing Supervisor, MainOne Cable company, Mr. Timitope Osunrinde, said that there are data centres in the country that are certified tier 111, of which MainOne MDX-i is one of the most connected data centers in the world, because it has submarine cable connected to it, which can host website servers.
According to him, MainOne data center was built in-line with PCI DSS and ISO 27001 standard to guarantee security and wondered why Nigerians should host their website servers abroad when there are data centers locally which are of international standard.