A cloud service firm, Layer3Cloud, has alerted the public on the dangers of banking on foreign cloud service providers to keep their data.

Layer3’s Chief Sales Officer, Theresa Adeyinka, noted that Nigerian businesses and agencies who patronise foreign cloud service providers put the country at risk by having their data stored in data centres abroad.

“Given the dangers that are associated with holding data abroad, it is only logical that Nigerian businesses move to host their data locally,” Adeyinka recommended.

She said the need for Nigeria to host its content locally is greater than ever before.

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She expressed the fear that foreign agents may act against Nigeria-related data hosted within their territories, advising businesses and government agencies to minimise risk by keeping their data closer to home.

“Cloud infrastructure providers like Layer3’s Layer3Cloud are making this a much easier action to take, hosting data for organisations in several industries. Our services are globally certified with PCIDSS, ISO27001 and ISO27017 certifications and run out of data centres in Lagos and Abuja, thus bringing the cloud much closer to Nigerian users.”

“Layer3Cloud provides virtual servers, disaster recovery, data backup and object storage services while helping businesses transit to the cloud and enable them to instantiate multiple cloud computing use cases to their advantage,” she said.

Adeyinka added: “Foreign bodies are having access to our data because many Nigerians host their data with foreign cloud service providers, who in turn keep the data in physical stations in their country, and sometimes even hold it in a data centre located in a third country.

“This raises all sorts of security concerns as organisations whose data are hosted in other countries do not have immediate access to the physical spaces in which they are kept.