National Information Technology Agency (NITA and its private sector technical partner, Smart Infraco have called on Ghanaian institutions to start hosting their data in the country to prevent the situation where businesses and their customers were denied access to their data  during the recent disruption on four undersea cables.
Last month’s disruption occurred on MainOne, WACS, Sat-3 and ACE cables, all of which run from Europe in the West, with landing stations in Ghana and other parts of Africa, through to Cape Town in South Africa.
All the telecoms operators in Ghana were affected, but AT Ghana recovered quickly because it had redundancy on a another cable, WIOCC, coming from India in the East, so it migrated all of its load onto that cable and restored service in less than 24 hours. But MTN and Telecel customers had to wait for days before service was fully restored.
Other private institutions, particularly banks and companies which deal with huge volumes of customer data, also suffered gravely, particularly because a lot of them host their data outside of Ghana, so the outage affected access to the data, and made life really difficult for their customers over a long period.
The Director-General of NITA, Richard Okyere-Fosu noted that during the outage, internet service for government institutions was restored within the space of 24 hours, because its technical partner, Smart Infraco had redundant capacity from various locations, plus a state-of-the-art data centre with enough capacity to host data locally for all institutions safely.
He lauded Smart Infraco for the swiftness with which it restored services to government institutions and urged private institutions in Ghana, particularly the ones which were gravely affected by the recent outage to consider working with Smart Infraco for support services in that direction.
Techfocus24 has been speaking with the Head of Sales and Commercial at Smart Infraco, Alfred Nkrow and he has been explaining how the company was able to restore service to all government institutions within 24 hours, and the benefit businesses will get if they choose to host their data locally rather than overseas.
He noted that Smart Infraco has a number of redundant capacities from various sources, which helped them to bring all of their hosted networks up within 24 hours, saying that “one other thing that helped public institutions mostly was the fact that they were hosting their infrastructure locally so they were able to access all the critical applications during the outage.”
According to Alfred Nkrow, Smart Infraco has a locally hosted Cloud in Ghana, fully functioning, supported, properly protected and very resilient, so most of the traffic/data do not go outside Ghana.
He said the national data centre, which Smart Infraco operates on behalf of NITA, is a certified Tier Three Data Centre, which is at par with any data centre anywhere in the world.
“We therefore urge business owners to pay a visit the national data centre, see things for themselves and stop hosting their data outside. When you host your data locally, you know the laws that govern it and the people who are in charge of the data. But when you host it outside, you don’t even know the particular country or location where it is hosted, so when something happens your ability to recover is much more difficult,” he said.
Alfred Nkrow also noted that, in addition to getting easy access to your data in times of disaster, hosting the data locally also cuts cost tremendously because “we charge in cedis, whereas those abroad charge in dollars, meanwhile we have all the necessary resilience and virtual servers which are more efficient.”
He said in this digital era, it also makes better business sense to host data on virtual servers within a multi-tenant environment, where costs and infrastructure are shared but with high level security, rather than using expensive physical servers in one’s office, which is a waste of money.
According to him, since the major internet outage last month, a number of public and private institutions have visited the national data centre and the prospects of them signing on for their data to be hosted locally are promising.
Alfred Nkrow assured Ghanaian institutions that the level of investment Smart Infraco has made to revamp the national data centre is unparalleled and the centre has now been turned into world-class data centre with a very high level of security that exceeds what other data centres offer elsewhere.
Indeed, Smart Infraco has recently signed a strategic agreement with Trend Micro, under the auspices of NITA, to deploy Trend’s antivirus and cybersecurity suites across all end nodes (computers, phones, tablets etc) used in accessing the networks of government institutions for work.
That is a testimony of the extent to which Smart Infraco is going to ensure that the data and the networks it hosts are fully protected from any cyber threats from any end-terminal devices.
