By Akpelu Paul Kelechi, in Lagos
From inception, PetroData Management Services has catered primarily to the data management needs of the oil majors operating in Nigeria. “It took several years for PetroData to persuade these to start trusting their data to our storage site at Ikeja, (in the north of Lagos, the country’s financial hub)”, Taukeme Koroye, member of PetroData’s board told a group of industry experts at the recent ISMS ISO 27001:2013 award ceremony presented to the company. “But it happened after several years of work and exposing our environment to them. “We are trusted by 95% of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria on data management”, he claimed.
Data management is moving away from physical storage environments to shared service platforms that are beyond our physical reach. “We have been investing in e-business for the past 4 years to basically provide data management services to clients that don’t have to have it physically hosted in the environment either because the CAPEX justification will be difficult for them or because on a Stand Alone basis, their requirement will not warrant that level of investment”. Rather than companies buying individual IT capabilities such as infrastructure, platform, software, support and so on that will drive up cost, they could buy these capabilities from one source and enjoy availability, reliability, high value addition at a reduced cost on a shared platform.
“We want to encourage our clients, financial institutions, SMEs, government agencies amongst others to start moving over to this platform that we have so that rather than CAPEX, they start working on OPEX, rather than individual capabilities that will be built into these areas, they buy capabilities from one source and enjoy it” Koroye urges.
Depending on where you go from that migration path, from infrastructure as a service through platform to software, there will be different degree of the CAPEX-OPEX mix. The end point is when you are at software as a service that you can be said to be entirely on OPEX. Effective cost reduction during IT migration largely depends on your appetite for either one big move or stage by stage move. Overall, 70% of IT executives believe that moving to cloud technologies certainly delivers efficiency over their managing themselves individually because this certainly delivers cost efficiency. Empirical evidence shows that operating cost in relation to resilience requirement will be a loss of 15%.
“PetroData has been operating to world-class standards in data management since 1995 and the award of the ISMS ISO 27001:2013 certification really confirms what we have been doing as a business proposition through all these years. If you went into a shared service platform that has a scale and capacity that you need rather than stand alone, your benefits will accrue at cost per unit of whatever your measure is. This will be lower investment cost, more efficiency, easily operative and you will get into it without the necessity of initial investment cost. We also have the best partnerships in all of the offices that are built, whether at application level or at infrastructure level; we have always partnered with best in class providers so that in line with world class standards, we are delivering value to clients consistently”, Koroye emphasized.
Only about five companies in Nigeria has attained the award of the Information Security Management System (27001:2013) certification by the International Standards Organization and PetroData is one of them.
“I’d like to say that this is an amazing achievement and there are not many organizations out there who can achieve this kind of certification”, Director for International Trade at the office of the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, said as he presented the certificate to Wole Shebioba, Managing Director of PetroData Management Services. “It’s a prestigious award and what it means is that it put you guys at the top; which mean you are one of the best companies out there”.
Babajide Soyode, chairman of PetroData added: “PetroData is now in the league of such entities as the World Bank, IMF, CBN who have achieved this prestigious award’.
