Prof. Muhammed Abukakar, managing Director and CEO, Galaxy Backbone Limited, has expressed the company’s preparedness to provide ICT infrastructure and services to public institutions and the underserved communities in Nigeria.

Timi Fadeyi, head DataCentre at Galaxy Backbone

Galaxy Backbone is a public enterprise of the Federal Government of Nigeria incorporated in 2006 with the primary mandate of setting up and operating a unified Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure platform that addresses the connectivity, transversal and other technology imperatives for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the Federal Government.

Abukakar was speaking on ‘Boosting Cloud Infrastructure for Digital Economy via Partnerships’ through a representative, Mr. Timi Fadeyi, head DataCentre at Galaxy Backbone Limited, at the (hybrid) Africa Tech Alliance Forum (AfriTECH2021) organised by TechEconomy.ng in Lagos (Nigeria) recently.

The Managing Director while streamline digitisation aligned with Bill Mcdermott SAP CEO who said: “Complexity is an obstacle to digitisation. To get the most out of the new world of digital business, you have to run SIMPLE.”

The trend of the new world

He said that the trends of the new world include hyper-connectivity, cloud computing, a smarter world and cybersecurity. These can be considered as four pillars necessary to drive digitalisation using infrastructure which will be used to service the community.

The realities of the digital economy as outlined by Abukakar the undeniable facts that digital economy is real and here to stay; “you have to embrace, innovate and thrive through it”.

He told the participants that reimagining your organisation cannot be overemphasised in this era.

“We need to work smarter, faster and simpler – a combination of a hybrid mode of working and harnessing relationships; virtual, physical, both.

“Artificial Intelligence is reshaping value chains, industries, communities, countries and the works entirely. You also need to secure your data; secure your entire digital experience, a combination of technology and you

Accelerators of the digital economy

Continuing, the Galaxy Backbone boss said, “To every action, there’s indeed a reaction. The digital economy keeps growing and transforming”.

Several components influence this growth and Abukakar summarised these thus: “The customer experiment which is driving the changes visible on different platforms; the core business processes on platforms that are smarter, faster and simple; smarter and engaged workforce to prevent different levels of possible disconnections; supplier-partner collaboration has never been this critical for an enhanced digital economy; and cloud harnessed Internet of Things and assets to drive real-time insights and new business initiatives.

He also said that cloud investments must be channeled right to enable an increase in revenue

The cloud and the digital economy

“The cloud is the preferred ‘currency’ for digital transformation and for reducing the initial cost of ICT infrastructure acquisition.

“Cloud computing is gradually reducing the downtime in public service delivery, increasing government and citizen engagement. It enables agility, flexibility, connectedness and the opportunity to scale your business”, he added.

Abubakar noted that with the help of the Ministry of Communities and the Digital Economy led by Prof. Isa Pantami and support from the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the National Communications Commission (NCC), Galaxy Backbone is well-positioned to provide ICT infrastructure in a way that both parties — governments, institutions, NDAs among others can benefit.

Meanwhile, he said that the pillars that drive the mission of Galaxy Backbone include; to becoming the leading enabler of digital inclusion in Africa: Provides state of the art digital infrastructure and services for a digital Nigeria; to align its operations with government priorities; promote data sovereignty and security of government data, amongst others.

“Galaxy Backbone improves long-term financial sustainability, customer satisfaction, improve satisfaction, adoption and confidence in digital services

“Enhancing the digital economy through partnership, GBB provides its data services from two major locations including Abuja and Enugu. Data lost at one centre can be recovered at the other. This can be described as a data continuity solution”, he said.

According to Abukakar, data sensitivity determines which data centre to be used. This can be a virtual data centre, computing pool, resource pool; storage resource pool, elastic cloud server, among others.

“Economies of scale is an important factor to be considered that allows you to save a lot while running your own infrastructure,” he concluded.