By Dipo Olowookere
The Executive Management of Galaxy Backbone led by the Managing Director/CEO, Yusuf Kazaure recently played host to the leadership of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), last week, when they paid a courtesy call to the Galaxy Backbone headquarters in Abuja. It was a great opportunity for both agencies to share ideas on how they could use their unique roles as agencies of government, in driving the technology development of the nation.
In welcoming Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, the Director General for NITDA, Mr. Kazaure expressed delight at this visit to Galaxy Backbone which shows a commitment to working together to institute and deliver a more service driven technology experience to the government. The visit afforded him and his team an opportunity to also take a tour of Galaxy Backbone’s world class Datacentre and Network Operating Centre (NOC).
The Galaxy Backbone CEO used this visit to share once again, the organisation’s role as the shared services provider to government agencies and the active work going on within GBB to ensure that government agencies experience world class connectivity and hosting services. He also expressed his apologies on the poor service experience most agencies experienced in the last two weeks which was greatly caused by a fault experienced by one of the country’s international upstream service providers which affected internet services across the nation. That has been completely resolved and all the agencies affected have been brought back to normalcy. However, more proactive efforts have been put in place to ensure that such down time is never experienced in the future. In strengthening this, Kazaure stated that Galaxy Backbone would like to partner with NITDA to actively drive capacity building across government agencies to ensure full adoption of its services. He also praised the role NITDA is playing in crafting out policies and standards.
As an organisation committed to excellence in service delivery across all the agencies and institutions and the nation as a whole, Galaxy Backbone was recently recognized by the British Standards Institute (BSI), with the ISO 20000 certificate for excellence in service delivery. The DG of NITDA, while making his statements during this interaction, congratulated Galaxy Backbone on this worthy achievement and encouraged GBB to not rest on its achievements. He also stressed the importance for both agencies to work together and collaborate more in order to take the technology experience in Nigeria to new heights; ‘we congratulate you on your recent attainment of the ISO 20000 Certification. I believe it is important that we work together to support each other in order to move the industry forward and deliver on our respective mandates to the nation’.
While on the tour of Galaxy Backbone’s Data Centre & Operations Centre, Mr. Kazaure stressed again on the committed efforts of the organisation in ensuring that Data is hosted locally in Nigeria under a secure environment. In line with the drive towards Data Sovereignty, GBB is poised to provide a hosting environment that guarantees the security of government’s sensitive Data. He also explained that processes are being improved within the organisation to ensure that government agencies and all other organisations that use the Galaxy Backbone infrastructure are assured of an excellent experience.