E-Business
How Signal Alliance Rejigged Continental Re’s Processes with Cloud Tech

Office 365 has saved a lot of time and costs and helped improve productivity. This cloud-based software is actually more secure than on-premises platforms, said Kanma Okafor, CIO, Continental Reinsurance, while recounting how Signal Alliance reduced the company’s costs using Microsoft Cloud technology.
The Pan-African reinsurance outfit, Continental Reinsurance, needed to address power outages in its native Lagos, especially as the outages were leading to lost emails.
Okafor recalled that they implemented Office 365 and not only gained 99.9% availability (successfully handling the outage issue), but also a raft of further compelling benefits.
These range from dramatic cost savings and anytime, anywhere mobility to significant productivity gains and the removal of time-consuming, inefficient, paper-based processes.
Continental Reinsurance is a pan-African composite reinsurer that was founded in 1985, and started business as a private reinsurance company in Nigeria and, in 1990, became a composite reinsurer offering its services through insurance companies and brokers.
Today, it has six client service centers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Tunisia and Botswana. From its Nigerian headquarters, it has grown a diversified portfolio in more than 44 countries.
The company prides itself on being truly Pan-African and on being the ‘torch bearer’ for the African Reinsurance sector: in no way limited by physical borders. Because of the company’s adoption of Office 365, it is able to operate with a relatively small number of staff. It started with 50 employees and today has a total of 100 staff at its six client service centers.
The company had initially used Eudora email. However, following a lack of development and support, the latter’s functionality proved limited. On top of this, power outages in Nigeria were causing significant problems.
Kanma Okafor, CIO, Continental Reinsurance explained, thus, “Power supply in Nigeria is a major issue and our servers were losing power in the middle of the night. When the servers shut down, emails were dropped. So we didn’t get all of our emails. Of course, this was causing problems and slowing down some of our operations.” Rather than wrestle with its existing platform, the company decided to seek an alternative. “We were essentially looking for a platform that would address the power and bandwidth issues and guarantee availability. The technology market develops rapidly, and we wanted a platform that would offer more functionality and also support mobility,” added Kanma Okafor.
Solution
Following an appraisal of competing technologies (including a hosted Exchange platform from 123.com), the company chose Office 365.
Kanma Okafor said, “Of course, it provides hosted Exchange from the cloud, so it addressed the issue of availability and lost emails. However, at the same time, its other features were also really compelling.”
For instance, OneDrive is a cloud-based file hosting service that allows users to sync files and later access them from a web browser or mobile device. It provided Continental Reinsurance with an immediately accessible system for backing up documents and ensuring the latest document versions were available.
To achieve needed functionality, the company had previously had to write shell scripts, which required programming knowledge and was also time-consuming. Office 365 also delivers Skype for Business, a cost effective collaboration tool for businesses, as a central feature. Continental Reinsurance aimed to create a video conferencing platform using Skype for Business as the foundation. This would be used to connect its six client service centers.
Another stand out feature for Continental Reinsurance was SharePoint Online. The company immediately saw the value in SharePoint Online as a means for sharing, organizing and managing data online and replacing inefficient, time-consuming, paper-based processes.
Furthermore, as well as underpinning and advancing its mobility strategy by providing employees access to Office 365 from mobile devices, the cloud-based productivity suite was also set to drive significant savings as a result of significantly reduced license fees.
For Kayode Faseyitan, manager in charge of Microsoft Services and Licenses, this was a compelling benefit: “We knew we could achieve really big savings. Added to the collaboration features in Office 365, we had no hesitations about choosing it.”
The company engaged IT partner Signal Alliance, Africa’s leading Microsoft partner, to drive the roll out. It was achieved within 60 days across all six client service centers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and Tunisia. The roll out also included the creation of electronic workflows in SharePoint Online.
Benefits
Alongside being the first company in Africa to implement Office 365, Continental Reinsurance gained a raft of compelling benefits: from high availability for emails to the removal of time consuming, paper-based processes and concomitant efficiency gains for significant cost-savings and more efficient business operations. “Office 365 has saved a lot of time and costs, and it helped improve productivity. This cloud-based software is actually more secure than on-premises platforms,” said Kanma Okafor.
With the implementation of Office 365, alongside other cost-saving cloud projects, Continental Reinsurance now has ICT expenses that total about 0.7% of revenue compared to a global average of 3%; Savings of two-thirds on license costs, the company pays about one-third of what it estimated for license costs; High availability of email platform, 99.9% with no downtime; Integration of Skype for Business with Polycom technologies to create a video conferencing platform. This resulted in large savings on travel costs, as staff no longer need to travel so often between company locations and Skype for Business-based videoconferencing enables immediate collaboration between different locations across Africa.
Also, SharePoint Online leads to the creation of 20 online workflows; ranging from claims to onboarding new customers. This boosts productivity across the business; SharePoint Online-based workflows result in 50% savings on time previously spent on paper-based processes; Underpinning mobility with employees able to work from any location, including home, and access all relevant documents and emails; OneDrive provides an up-to-date repository for company documents; enabling employees to easily back up and access the latest versions of their documents; and Security is watertight with more security features than on-premises infrastructures.
Continental Reinsurance is a pan-African reinsurer with locations in Nigeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and Tunisia. It has business operations in 44 countries worldwide.
E-Business
Microsoft Servers Hacked by Chinese Groups

Chinese “threat actors” have hacked Microsoft’s SharePoint document software servers and targeted the data of the businesses using it, the firm has said.
China state-backed Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as well as China-based Storm-2603 were said to have “exploited vulnerabilities” in on-premises SharePoint servers, the kind used by firms, but not in its cloud-based service.
The US tech giant has released security updates in response and has advised all on-premises SharePoint server customers to install them.
“Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are still ongoing,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The firm said it had “high confidence” the hackers would continue to target systems which have not installed its security updates.
It added that it would update its website blog with more information as its investigation continues.
Microsoft said it had observed attacks in which hackers had sent a request to a SharePoint server “enabling the theft of the key material by threat actors”.
Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting firm, a division of Google Cloud, told reporter, it was “aware of several victims in several different sectors across a number of global geographies”.
Carmakal said it appeared that governments and businesses that use SharePoint on their sites were the primary target.
A number of adversaries who stole material encoded by cryptography were then able to regain ongoing access to the victims’ SharePoint data, he said.
“This was exploited in a very broad way, very opportunistically before a patch was made available. That’s why this is significant,” Carmakal said.
Carmakal said the “China-nexus actor” was deploying techniques similar to previous campaigns associated with Beijing.
Microsoft said Linen Typhoon had “focused on stealing intellectual property, primarily targeting organizations related to government, defence, strategic planning, and human rights” for 13 years.
It added that Violet Typhoon had been “dedicated to espionage”, primarily targeting former government and military staff, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, higher education, the media, the financial sector and the health sector in the US, Europe, and East Asia.
Meanwhile, Storm-2603 was “assessed with medium confidence to be a China-based threat actor”.
E-Business
NIMC Warns Nigerians of Fake NIN Website

National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has issued a public warning that it is not associated with NINcard.com.
According to the commission, the website has been circulating online to offer services for Nigerians seeking National Identification Number (NIN) services.
NIMC, in a post on its official X account on Wednesday, said, “NINcard.com is not in anyway affiliated to NIMC. Stay vigilant!”
The warning was accompanied by screenshots of fake payment receipts and OTP request pages from the website, both of which were boldly stamped “FAKE” by NIMC to alert the public.
E-Business
NITDA, API Partner Against Harmful Online Content

National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), in partnership with the Advocacy for Policy and Innovation (API), has convened a one-day workshop in Abuja to advance dialogue on the draft Online Harm Protection (OHP) Bill to confront harmful online content.
The bill, a rights-based, locally rooted, and multi-stakeholder initiative, is aimed at addressing the challenges of the digital age.
The event, which held yesterday, brought together government officials, civil society, academics, digital platforms, and legal experts to shape a policy framework designed to combat online ills such as cyberbullying, disinformation, hate speech, digital exploitation, and gender-based violence, while safeguarding democratic freedoms and digital inclusion.
In his keynote remarks, Kashifu Inuwa, director general, NITDA urged a paradigm shift in the way society engages with digital technologies.
“For almost two decades, we have viewed digital technology through a consumer lens. But these technologies are not just products and services. They are transforming how we live, work, and interact. They shape our politics, our society, and our democracy,” he said.
Warning against unaccountable digital power in the hands of private corporations, the DG likened the digital journey to the tale of Alice in Wonderland, where initial fascination with innovation has given way to deeper concerns about privacy, autonomy, and manipulation by big tech platforms.
“We thought we were using Google, but now we realise Google is using us. Social media, once a tool of expression, has become a tool of surveillance and influence,” Inuwa noted.
He, therefore, emphasised the urgency of developing a democratic and accountable framework. He explained that following the 2021 Twitter ban, NITDA facilitated dialogue between the government and platform operators, leading to a Code of Practice that stressed Nigeria’s sovereignty and legal standards.
According to him, the same process birthed the multi-stakeholder steering committee and the OHP White Paper in December 2024, laying the foundation for the current legislative push.
Earlier in her opening remarks, Victoria Manya, co-founder, API, observed the moral and civic necessity of the bill.
Her words: “The internet did not break society, it merely revealed its unfiltered version. Every day, Nigerians are exposed to harassment, disinformation, exploitation, and even algorithmic violence. The OHP Bill is not a war on the Internet. It is a peace offering to its users, a social contract for a digital future that is safe, inclusive, and democratic.
“We cannot answer the question of algorithmic power with unchecked state control. We must answer it with shared, rights-based governance. This bill must not be written for the people, but with them.”
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