The Twitter community went up in flames last year when the official accounts of notable personalities like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama were hacked by individuals who managed to rip some followers of their cryptocurrency. Those accounts were suspended for some days pending investigations but what this did was to alert the world to the need for heightened cybersecurity in countries.
In Nigeria, particularly, where cybercrime has been on the increase in the last couple of years, cybersecurity is a touchy topic; especially since global laws expect that customer data should not be stored outside the company of origin and most of the cloud services companies are international. There is, however, a local cloud company providing cloud services for Nigerians in Nigeria.
Cloudflex was founded in 2016 and has focused on providing cloud support infrastructure and services for companies away from the company premises. Founder and CEO of Cloudflex, Remi Adejumo was a guest on Nairametrics Business Half Hour recently, where he explained that the company was created to provide tailored solutions for clients in the Nigerian space.
Having worked almost three decades in several institutions, the last of which was EcoBank Nigeria Plc where he was in charge of IT Infrastructure, Adejumo saw the opportunity to create a Nigerian-built cyber-security solution, “that is fully Nigerian and run by Nigerians.”
“This is not a service where one size fits all. We have our peculiarities as a market and we are designed to serve the Nigerian market. If you want to get a foreign cloud service, you could wait 6 to 8 weeks, but if you want to get one from Cloudflex, you could have it in 24 hours.” Adejumo explained.
When companies were making several adjustments to fully activate the remote-working policy at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, the importance of cloud services became more obvious. Companies needed a round-the-clock server from where the staff could access data from their homes and still work seamlessly.
The rule of keeping data within the country of origin allows Cloudflex to collaborate rather than compete with international players like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS, and use one another’s platforms.
There are a lot of security concerns about cloud services which some people think is not safe enough, but cloud-service providers would still insist that they are the safest option.
“The cloud platform is far safer than your own private server because your private server is on your premises and everyone knows where it is. From experience, 70% of breaches are done by the staff of your own organisation, and having a third party manage your own platform, means that you and your staff don’t know where it is. There is a protocol in giving access from the service provider, so security is higher. The data breach is not just financial, it is also intellectual. You can secure a building as much as you want, but as long as there is a door, somebody can still go in. That is the limit to your physical server in your office premises,” Adejumo explained.
There are also advancements in predictive learning, analysis, and reactive security, that allows the cloud systems to detect and flag activities outside the patterns until it is confirmed and validated.
Like most other startups in the tech space, funding remains a challenge. Adejumo recounts that the company started off solely on his savings and proceeds from the sales of some assets. Nigerian investors appear to still be sceptical of the tech startups and the result of this is that a lot of investment in the tech space comes from outside the country.
Cloud services will play a major role in the future of cybersecurity and Cloudflex is poised to take a space in that scene. According to Adejumo, the company is in the process of securing funds for expansion, although crowdfunding is not one of the options being considered.
