An Information and Communications Technology expert, James
Ahilari, on Monday said that majority of the content accessed in Africa by
local users was hosted overseas.
He said that similar to emails, which make a circuitous
journey outside the continent, usually to Europe, America or even Asia and
back, “African content is not really delivered from Africa.”
According to him, due to infrastructure and cost reasons,
content owners in Africa have traditionally hosted their content outside the
shores of the continent.
Ahilari said, “This creates several challenges: the process
of routing traffic outside the continent costs more as Internet service providers
face higher transit costs to deliver the content to local users by shipping
from offshore.
“It also delays
content delivery to the region, further compromising the user experience. A
study commissioned by the Internet Society in Rwanda discovered that a local
content developer achieved a savings of only $111 per annum on hosting
overseas, but this cost Rwandan Internet Service Providers about $13,500 in
transit costs to deliver the content to local users.
He added.
“Discussions around data residency and data sovereignty have soared recently,
with the Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency making a
bold pronouncement on Nigerian content hosted within the country.”
He said that such regulations were popular globally, noting that
they were originally triggered by the dominance of United States companies on
the Internet and the Patriot Act, amplified by the Snowden allegations.
Ahilari explained, “More recently, corporate and national
anti-competitive practices aimed at gaining industrial or other competitive
advantages such as cyber-attacks and data sniffing, data hostage and bad debt
have further escalated the need to protect data as a national asset.
“Several countries have quickly implemented national
residency, localisation or domiciliation laws to enforce the retention of data
in the country of origination with most European countries, Russia, China,
Malaysia and Indonesia enacting Data Domiciliation regulations.”
The ICT expert further said, “Brazil and Vietnam insist on a
local copy of all data involving nationals even as the Australian government
has imposed restraints on health data leaving the country. These governments
have cited foreign surveillance and increasing cyber security threats as an
argument for data residency and localisation.
“Unfortunately, Africa has not been proactive in terms of
data domiciliation as other climes. Though some countries in Africa have data
protection legislative bills in place, enforcement of local laws has been a
problem over the years.
“Perhaps the dearth
of data centres on the continent made such enforcement difficult. With the
emergence of indigenous Data Centers within the country in recent years
including Galaxy Backbone, MainOne and Rack Center with more to come, Nigeria
has no excuse not to enforce data residency laws for Nigerian data.”
He said, “With full enforcement, the impact of local data
centers, locally-hosted content and the investment in the Internet Exchange
Point of Nigeria on Internet experience in Nigeria will be enormous.
By their presence in-country, these local data centres
guarantee lower bandwidth costs, quicker access to content providers and
carriers, local peering and lower latency for local markets.
“The recent effort at entrenching data residency by the IT
regulatory agency, the National Information Technology Development Agency,
which made local hosting of government websites a mandatory requirement, is
therefore commendable but it needs to be enforced.”
He also said, “While this is a good start for Nigeria, there
are obvious opportunities that the regulator should be going after. The
homegrown digital payment platform adopted by the Federal Government for its
Treasury Single Account policy is hosted outside the country.
“As at December 2016,
the software had helped the government recover N4.3tn of its cash assets idling
in the Deposit Money Banks. It also processes $30bn transactions annually and
serves 500+ microfinance banks and 1000+ merchants, billers, multinationals,
Small and Medium Enterprises and governments at various levels.”
Ahilari added,
“Likewise, the immigration service hosts its database for passport registration
outside the country. These databases contain critical information about too
many Nigerians to reside in foreign data centres.l
“Hosting such critical data outside the country is extremely
dangerous. It is time to commence enforcement of data protection and privacy
legislations to ensure that beyond websites, critical Nigerian data across
pivotal sectors as finance, oil and gas, healthcare, and government agencies
reside in Nigeria.”
PUNCH
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