Having successfully denied Nigeria the chances of playing a leading role in digital economy revolution in Africa due to its last minute change of mind to dump Nigeria for South Africa in the establishment of $30bn datacenter, Microsoft have tactically started customer drive in Nigeria for the newly commissioned centre.
Though the drive was technically veiled to mean an event aimed towards creating awareness around its Azure offering as well as drive cloud migration in the country, some industry experts who were annoyed over the rejection of Nigeria for the multibillion dollar scheme after first naming Nigeria as the venue, said the hidden aim of hosting the event is to drag market share in data migration and hosting knowing that Nigeria remains the largest data hosting market in the continent after all.
Recall that Microsoft had dumped Nigeria as host of its new datacenter on grounds of dearth of supporting infrastructure and what it described as lack of human capacity to run the complex on delivery in Nigeria.
Many Nigerian experts had decried the relocation plan, saying had it been built in Nigeria, it would have become a sustainable game changer in the economy by lifting the economy in every aspect of digital economy and massive jobs creation.
In his remarks at the event in Lagos, Country Manager at Microsoft, Akin Banuso, said “We created our Azure cloud offering recognising that organisations that migrate to the cloud would require an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help them meet business challenges.
“The solution also allows organisations the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using preferred tools and frameworks.
“For business transformation in the digital age, this allows organisations in Nigeria to pay only for cloud services used, helping to lower operating costs, run infrastructure more efficiently, and streamlining scaling as business needs change.”
Also speaking, Wale Olokodana, Intelligent Cloud (Azure) Business Group Lead, Microsoft, noted that “For organisations in the country not wanting to move to the public cloud completely, leveraging a hybrid model may be better suited.
Business Hilights recalls that the new South African based Microsoft datacenter came with Azure offerings with cloud computing facilities.
Olokodana added that “This combines private and public cloud capabilities, allowing data and applications to be shared between them.”
“Furthermore, when computing and processing demand fluctuates, hybrid cloud computing provides businesses with the ability to seamlessly scale their on-premises infrastructure up to the public cloud to handle any overflow—without giving third-party data centres access to the entirety of their data.
Explaining more and coming out of his shells, Banuso averred that “Organisations are afforded the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud for basic and non-sensitive computing tasks, while keeping business-critical applications and data on-premises, safely behind a company firewall.
Banuso boosted the campaign for Nigerian clients for the South African located datacenter saying “With Microsoft recently launched first cloud datacenter for Africa in South Africa; the latter will allow for faster, more agile business operations and provide access to next-generation technologies for the rest of the continent, including Nigeria.”
