Experts Advocate Cloud Adoption Among MSMEs To Drive Business Efficiency

Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise (MSME) owners in Nigeria have been advised to adopt cloud services to drive efficiency, agility, and innovation in their businesses. 

This was the position held by IT experts at the webinar series organised by Rack Centre on Thursday, June 22, 2023, titled “Promoting Cloud Neutrality: Cloud adoption as a cost-effective and efficient direction for MSMEs”.

In his opening remarks, senior sales manager, Rack Centre, Kelechukwu Nsofor, who moderated the session, explained that the discussion around cloud adoption by businesses in Nigeria had become necessary in view of the transformation being witnessed in the digital space.

Leading the conversation, senior account cloud engineer, Oracle, Ismaila Salami, analysed the transition in the digital space over the last two decades. He disclosed that 50 per cent of in-house applications deployed in organisations are still on-premises. He added that there is a need for medium enterprises, in particular, to adopt the cloud for their infrastructure, especially at a time when data is getting more proliferated.

Speaking during the panel session, Assistant General Manager Cyber Cloud, Laurel Onumonu stated that a large percentage of digitized SMEs do not require cloud computing services, noting that the nature of the business or capacity determines whether cloud services would be required. 

Also speaking at the panel session, chief technology officer, INQ Digital Nigeria, Stephen Okoye, stated that cloud providers or connectivity players are gradually stepping up to provide the needed infrastructure for users to access the content they usually source abroad. 

There is now low latency and ease of access to content with the entrance of ISPON, Google, Microsoft, and other cloud providers.

On his part, Azure Go-To-Market Lead, Africa, Microsoft, Chuks Okpaka, explained that the fear of multiple tenants in a data collocation centre experiencing data breaches do not arise as cloud service providers now have several measures in place to prevent unauthorised access or data leakage.

Sharing his experience as a business user, vice president, Infrastructure, Qore, Okey Chimeh noted that leveraging cloud services has significantly helped save costs and enhance speed in financial institutions.