If you’re a business owner, it might not matter to you wh ere exactly in the cloud your data is stored. Once you’ve gone beyond saving your relevant information in a notebook under your bed to using a software or website germane to your business, then it shouldn’t matter whether the servers that host your data are in the United Kingdom or Nigeria right? Well, not really. Research shows that it really does matter; not only does hosting data internationally come with attendant risks and challenges, hosting data locally keeps data safer, makes technology more accessible to organizations and boosts Gross Domestic Product, GDP and Foreign Exchange. For a country that is going through a recession, this is good news. Little wonder the Chief Executive Officer of Rack Centre, Mr. Tunde Coker was literally on cloud nine when the preached the gospel of ‘Cloud on Ground’ to select ICT journalists in Lagos recently. Excerpts: By Laju Iren RACK Centre is planning to launch Cloud on Ground. What does it mean and how does it work? In the last ten years, technology solution providers have been talking about cloud computing and how data could be stored in the cloud for safety and easy accessibility, but today, technology is evolving and we at Rack Centre concluded that data could be stored locally in the cloud, without having to host the servers in foreign countries. Yes we are always focused on our key business, which is collocating data but we felt it a better business sense to build cloud locally that will enable more organisations store their data in the cloud locally, without facing the risk or challenges of hosting data outside Nigeria. This exactly led to the concept, Cloud on Ground, which means cloud is here with us and no longer hosted outside the shores of Nigeria as it used to be. Comprehensive market place So Cloud on Ground relates to a whole ecosystem of cloud provision capability, where various cloud solutions from West Africa, are hosted in Rack Centre in Nigeria. So Cloud on Ground is a market place where people have access to do different kinds of businesses. It is a comprehensive market place and an ecosystem for all the key facilities required to consume cloud services, while the data sits in Rack Centre in Nigeria. The idea is not to serve only the interests of big corporate organisations, but also the interests of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We believe it is going to transform technology in West Africa and Nigeria because it will make technology more accessible to SMEs and corporate organisations. What benefit does ‘Cloud on Ground’ bring to Nigerian businesses? Let’s say we have one million SMEs in the country that would be using hot mail or other services. With some of those services being available locally, it means that what they would not have had at all before, they now have access to. If you take larger companies for instance, to actually build your own IT, you have to buy your own equipment and build your own data centre. We are now in a stage where we are saying that you do not need to do that, you can collocate in Rack centre and also have access to other services that complement your own corporate needs. This means that you can actually go out and focus on your business and then on ‘as you go’ basis, you can scale both your collocation and the cloud services that you consume. I’m using cloud here as a broad term to include access to web hosting, structure, enterprise resource planning on a shared basis; a collation of the eco system services needed in one place. How, in your opinion can technology help bring the Nigerian economy out of its current recession? It will require neater, cost saving thinking for companies to get out of this recession. And that is what we offer companies. You can save costs and get yourself out of trouble quickly by engaging rack centre. Rack centre is the sort of underpining technology that you need to build other things on. Technology has to be accessible and cost efficient, and having collocated data centre capabilities and cloud services- those are the things that drive accessibility and cost effectiveness. There is also the process of making sure that e- government in place. Government becomes more efficient with e-government in place. It makes it easier to curb corruption with the implementation of e-government. Also, the more companies use technology, the better. Let’s not fool ourselves, we will continue to use technology that is not home grown-it’s a world-wide phenomenon. But we can have the combination of the home grown plus other expertise that we have to bring in from elsewhere to aid the growth of businesses. The more we do this, the more we build local technology capabilities and the more we find that there is growth in competencies and the businesses that provide both software, hardware and consultancy for other businesses that use technology. It is perfectly realistic to say that in the next five years we are going to see in a growing GDP, 18 percent of it being driven by technology. Local data hosting and the economy Research has shown that when you invest in building a data centre, the economic impact on the economy can range from at least ten fold to a hundred fold. So if you spend ten million dollars on building a data centre for example, the impact on the local economy would be anything from 100 million dollars. Value chain impact So if the running cost is say five million dollars, the value chain impact on the economy would be about fifty million to five hundred million. There is a cumulative impact on the economy. Local businesses also won’t have to spend a lot their own data centres that may break down all the time. They can leverage on the services here, have more efficient services and focus on their core business. So that’s on the data centre. For cloud, if you imagine the trickle effect of wanting to grow but not having the investment to do so. The investment is high, so businesses might need to get bank loans if they want to establish their IT infrastructure on their own. However, if you are able to consume services on an as you need basis, there is a systemic impact on the speed of growth of the business. By combining the collocation capabilities we have with cloud services, youre building a base has an enabling, transforming impact on the economy.