Professor Pantami disclosed this during an inspection tour of National Shared Service Centre (Tier III Data Centre) at Galaxy BackBone Limited in Abuja, Nigeria.
He said the center will not only be beneficial to public institutions but would benefit the private sectors as well every Nigerian in the area of broadband among others.
“Federal Government National Shared Service Centre upon competition is going to be an important National Project which I do hope very soon the Federal Government of Nigeria is going to commission it.Not only public institutions including private and including ordinary citizens that will benefit from the services, for example broadband and trainings among others” he noted .
The Minister assured Nigerians that the center will deepen digital literacy and services in Nigeria saying that “If you look at the facility it is a training center, this training center is for citizens. Trainings are going to be organised from time to time for our citizens in other to close the digital divide”
“This is one area that is going to be useful to our citizens becusase it is a government institution and citizens must benefit from this training.When citizens are trained by implication you are rising the probably of getting or being employed either by government or private institution or even by international organisations.”
He said that there were so many opportunities in the sector, adding that citizens should not restrict job creation to only the government or within Nigeria but to explore internationally.
“Today in the digital economy sector when we talk about job creation , don’t restrict that job creation to only government or within Nigeria.There are one thousand and one opportunities out there at international levels, what is most important is to have the skills and be able to display to them that you will be able to take up the challenge.So by training citizens it will be an opportunity to increase their probability of getting employment not in Nigeria but even at the international level with even the tech giants.”
The Minister disclosed that the data centre in Kano state, North-West Nigeria is already operational and preparations for the commissioning were on top gear.
The Director-General of Galaxy Backbone, Professor Mohammed Abubakar said that data centres are drivers of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) worldwide.
According to Professor Abubakar, we have the connectivity component of it and data centre component of it where you have all your information.
“As you know information is now our black gold and crude oil. Before we were storing our informations on files, which were confidential and it was only a few people that had access to it.Now the data is in the cloud. It is everywhere so the repository for that data is the data centres.”
He said that “All the information you have as a country is now going to be in the data centre that is in your control.There is a peculiarity, which is the protection of that data centre. If you have a data and it is not protected, then anything can happen”.
He affirmed that with digital infrastructure in place, the Government will be able to build a knowledge economy that will power a great digital economy, attain the government ICT penetration objectives and improve the economy of rural/underserved areas, leading to the creation of indirect jobs in the economy.
Galaxy Backbone Limited,GBB is Nigeria’s owned Digital Infrastructure and shared services platform for public and private organisations under the Nigerian Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy
Galaxy Backbone operates state-of-the-art Data centre infrastructure for the provision of secure and available Data centre services across the nation.
GBB also provides the hosting and colocation platform for software/applications and hardware services organisations in the private sector to leverage on.
Hauwa Abu
