With African countries such as Nigeria and Kenya developing fast economically, there is an increasing need to provide a modern IT infrastructure that benefits the 21st Century.
To capitalise on their growing economies and competitiveness, companies in African countries like these need to embrace converged cloud infrastructure because it overcomes these challenges. It offers a complete infrastructure platform which organisations can use for all of their cloud deployments.
Nigel Moulton, chief technology officer for the EMEA region of VCE comments: “A converged cloud infrastructure approach significantly accelerates the time to deploy new services whilst also reducing the risk of downtime. ”With this in mind, he says that it’s important to make the right technology choices, relating to deploying a public, private and hybrid clouds. He adds that the other key challenge that African organisations will face emanates from the need to ensure that a balance exists between business investments, trust and data privacy.
Addressing security
Kenya, for example, is keen to address these issues. In February 2013 the country launched its National Cyber-Security Strategy and Master Plan, which aims to act as a guide for private companies and public sector organisations to establish their approach to cyber-security. The problem has been that most organisations tend to address to this costly and concerning issue on a reactive basis, and so the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Information and Communication, Paul Kukubo, argued that the country needs to move towards adopting a better system to mitigate these threats. This is because he believes that passwords have had their day as a means of security.
Dennis Mbuvi also wrote in his article for CIO East Africa on cyber-security in Kenya that: “Recent security issues include the defacement of 103 government websites and a number of attacks have hit the banking sector.” It is therefore hoped that the plan will offer a governance mechanism for both the Kenyan government and the private sector. This entails creating a national security assets inventory and the establishment of a list of approved cyber-security vendors. Companies in sectors such as water, power infrastructure, banking and payments all use information communications technology (ICT) in some way, and so they are all exposed to cyber-security threats.
Moulton offers his thoughts on the scheme: “Any initiative that addresses the broad threats posed by cyber-criminals is to be welcomed.” He says that there is a need for increased awareness about passwords, and he argues that the public and private sectors alike have to become more vigilant than they have been to date. He believes this is necessary because “confidence in e-commerce will be a significant engine of growth for Kenya, and my advice would be to act quickly to make sure that all sections of Kenyan society are enabled to take advantage of the huge opportunities that internet-based commerce offers.”
