For companies in Nigeria currently battling the recession, the challenges are slowing sales and reduced earnings due to spiraling costs from high inflation. To manage cash flows, your business may have had to reduce or halt spending totally. However, the companies that will come out of the recession stronger must master the delicate balance between cutting costs to survive today and investing to grow tomorrow. According to a survey by the Harvard Business Review, companies that deploy a specific combination of conservative and progressive strategies have the highest probability—37%—of breaking away from the pack. These companies reduce costs selectively by focusing more on operational efficiency than their rivals do, even as they invest relatively comprehensively in the future by spending on marketing, R&D, and new assets. This multipronged strategy, is believed to be the best approach to surviving a recession and growing stronger into the future.
Adopting digital technologies is one strategy that businesses have adopted to optimize processes and drive new and improved measurable business results. However, there is a cost to technology deployment and there is the need for managers to aim at achieving the right balance between the technologies they want and the ones they need. One solution that allows companies deploy the technologies they need at lower costs is the adoption of outsourced data center and cloud services as an alternative to company owned on premise data centers. In Nigeria today, leveraging outsourced data center services is one of the few options available to businesses to immediately reduce costs while pursuing a digital transformation strategy.
In a recent technology adoption survey of senior executives and business managers by MHI and Deloitte, colocation and cloud computing received positive considerations as a business optimization strategy. Forty five percent of these executives indicated their enterprises adopted such solutions, making it one of the leading strategies that businesses have embraced to achieve cost savings and enterprise agility.
Only a few companies in West Africa can provide the right data center services for always-on enterprise businesses today. MainOne is the clear leader in Nigeria, offering secure and reliable outsourced data center services for enterprises in-country. These services are offered out of MainOne’s MDXi Tier III Data Center, already certified to PCI DSS, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 standards.
Some companies such as FBN Merchant Bank are already benefiting from these savings and the Chief Operating Officer, Mrs. Funke Ladimeji, has stated that outsourcing the company’s data center hosting needs has drastically reduced the company’s operational and capital expenses as well as enhanced its flexibility and agility.
“MainOne currently provides us with Cloud services, which provides flexibility, ability to scale and we have been able to streamline our overheads and leverage cloud in a flexible way. This has given us a lot more speed in terms of everything we do. It has become a lot more cost effective for us because we have saved significantly on capital outlay. MainOne has been providing us with really exceptional service”, she said.
Business analysts say on premise hosting is more expensive compared to outsourcing which offers between 20 and 50 percent total cost of ownership reductions over a three-year period. By implication, firms that adopt outsourced data center services, could save between 20 and 50% of their total IT budget while remaining competitive, flexible and more established in their respective sectors.
In addition to cost reduction, outsourcing of data center operations to an established third party enables firms to focus more on their areas of competitive advantage as well as improve their bottom-line compared to their counterparts that operate on premise data centers.
MainOne’s MDXi, a certified Tier III data center has provided best in class colocation services to enterprises since launch in 2015. The facility which provides floor space for housing IT equipment, along with all of the necessary power distribution, cooling, cabling, fire suppression and physical security systems is accessible and affordable to start-ups and established businesses. Colocated customers have direct access to a MainOne’s highly reliable and resilient network interconnected with major operators and ISP’s for domestic, regional and international access. The facility also provides unrivalled access to leading internet peering exchanges and global content providers.