LAGOS, Nigeria (XOL Africa) — Cloud infrastructure provider AFRICLOUD has launched a new cloud region in Lagos, allowing Nigerian businesses, startups and public-sector organizations to deploy computing and storage infrastructure on servers physically located in Nigeria.
The Lagos region, which went live Aug. 10, is AFRICLOUD’s third cloud region after Lisbon, Portugal, and Johannesburg, South Africa. The company said the infrastructure is hosted in a carrier-neutral data center in Lagos’ central business district.
The launch could give Nigerian organizations greater control over where their data is stored and processed, particularly businesses whose customers, regulators or procurement requirements require data to remain within the country.
AFRICLOUD said local hosting is also relevant to organizations operating under Nigeria’s Data Protection Act, although specific compliance obligations depend on each organization’s circumstances and require individual legal assessment.
“Nigeria is Africa’s largest internet market, and until now most Nigerian workloads have been hosted abroad by necessity,” said Oluniyi Ajao, founder of AFRICLOUD. “The Lagos region changes the default. Nigerian data can now live in Nigeria, on infrastructure built for the way this market pays and builds.”
The company said the Lagos region uses the same cloud platform available in its Lisbon and Johannesburg regions, providing customers with a single account and dashboard to manage infrastructure across the three locations.
The platform uses AMD EPYC processors and all-NVMe storage, with IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity available on its servers. AFRICLOUD said automated provisioning allows new servers to be deployed within minutes.
The company said its three-region network is designed to provide localized infrastructure across different parts of Africa while also allowing customers to manage workloads across multiple jurisdictions.
Lagos is intended to serve Nigeria and much of West Africa, while Johannesburg provides coverage for Southern and parts of East Africa. AFRICLOUD said the Lagos region also provides access to customers in the landlocked Sahel through terrestrial West African fiber networks, potentially reducing the need for some traffic to be routed through Europe.
Lisbon serves North Africa and parts of West Africa alongside Europe and provides a direct subsea connection to Brazil, according to the company.
AFRICLOUD said customers can keep Nigerian workloads in Lagos, European workloads in Lisbon and Southern African workloads in Johannesburg, allowing them to select infrastructure based on geographic and jurisdictional requirements.
The company said its cloud servers are available immediately to customers through its online dashboard.
AFRICLOUD provides compute, storage and networking services from data centers in Portugal, South Africa and Nigeria. The company says it serves customers across Africa, Europe and South America.
The Lagos launch comes as Nigerian businesses and public institutions increasingly rely on cloud computing while regulators and organizations place greater emphasis on data governance, security and the location of critical information infrastructure.
AFRICLOUD said its Lagos servers are available to customers now.
SUPPORT AFRICAN BUSINESS JOURNALISM
Help XOL Africa expand independent business reporting across Africa.
SUPPORT XOL AFRICA →
