According to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS), the amount of on-line transactions grew by 70% in February in comparison with January, a document month as a result of botched money redesign coverage. This improve in transactions left most business banks battle to maintain up with the demand for digital banking companies.
Adeoti Salami, a GTBank buyer, instructed TechCabal that throughout the money disaster, which lasted virtually 4 months, he might not entry his cash and that banks have been too congested. “GTBank suffered several downtimes where I couldn’t log in. One time, it was almost the entire day.” An Access Bank buyer, Martin Achimugu, instructed TechCabal, “For most of February and March, every time someone sent money to my account, I would not receive it until the next day or maybe two days later”.
While business banks struggled throughout the money disaster, some fintech startups grew tremendously. Bashir Yusuf, the Director of Partnerships for OPay, instructed TechCabal that OPay added over 10 million wallets in the primary quarter of the yr. “We started the year with 19 million wallet account holders, and at the last count we had 30 million wallet holders.” Considering how a lot business banks spent on expertise in the primary half of final yr—$178,268,979—, it stays curious why they may not present dependable companies throughout the money disaster.
Why are banks not shifting to the cloud?
OPay attributes its progress and reliability throughout the money disaster to its cloud-based infrastructure. According to Dotun Adekunle, the previous CTO and vice chairman of OPay, the fintech’s infrastructure is hosted totally in the cloud. This is not like most conventional banks that use a hybrid construction, which is a mixture of on-premises servers ({hardware} infrastructure bodily hosted) and on-cloud servers (like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure).
TechCabal spoke to 2 cloud engineers with expertise working with Nigerian banks. One of them instructed this publication, “One of the reasons most commercial banks had downtimes during the cash crisis was because of the load on their infrastructure, and that’s where the cloud comes in. “With the cloud, you can auto-scale. Auto-scaling increases the number of resources you have and helps accommodate an increase in demand. You can also reduce the resources you have if you don’t need them anymore,” he added.
The cloud engineer additionally shared that the database of one in every of his firm’s prospects (a business financial institution) was consistently crashing as a result of it might not deal with the rise in transactions. According to the engineer, most business banks in Nigeria use a mix of on-premises servers and cloud servers. “A lot of banks in Nigeria have not been able to move all their data to the cloud because a lot of the infrastructure was set up on-premises [in-house physical servers], so moving everything to the cloud may take time. They usually host their core banking services, which have the data of all their users and accounts, on-premises and prefer to host their mobile banking on the cloud”, he stated.
A cloud engineer at a business financial institution instructed Techcabal that the majority banks have additionally not moved completely to the cloud as a result of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has not “given the go-ahead” for banks to maneuver all their companies to the cloud. The CBN’s Information Technology Standards Blueprint was launched in 2014, across the similar time cloud computing grew to become mainstream. She additionally shared that banks can scale up their on-premises server, nevertheless it’s costlier and worrying than auto-scaling a cloud server.
Concerns in regards to the cloud
An excerpt from CBN’s guideline on cloud computing reads: “A gradual implementation approach is suggested for successful transition to cloud. This follows a slow migration process that steadily increases the number of processes or functions being hosted by the cloud. This migration approach is dependent on the ability for an objective assessment of the readiness of each individual service, and the components thereof, to be migrated to the cloud. The risk of moving highly confidential banking to the public cloud can be enormous if not properly controlled.”
According to the business financial institution’s engineer, a priority for many banks is community latency (the time it takes to switch information throughout the community) issues which may include cloud-based companies. “Amazon Web Services, for instance, has a data centre in South Africa, but the data centre in the west of the UK actually has better latency for Nigeria than the one in South Africa. Fast response times matter to customers, so latency is important for banks. It will help if we have data centres in Nigeria”.
Data centres have been arising across the continent. In January, Amazon launched Local Zones in Lagos. According to Robin Njiru, AWS’s regional public sector lead for West, East, and Central Africa, the launch will assist companies deploy latency-sensitive workloads and meet native information residency necessities.
…. to be continued
Read the Original Article
Copyright for syndicated content material belongs to the linked Source : TechCabal – https://techcabal.com/2023/04/21/cloud-infrastructure-nigerian-banks/