The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has launched a Data Centre, which has been built to Uptime Institute’s TIER III design standards.

The Data Center was commissioned by the Honourable Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu,

With this implementation, the NSE can now offer secure cloud services to both market operators and any firm interested in having a low-cost, highly available service for their customer base.

The Honourable Minister of Science and Technology commended the Exchange for achieving the milestone of a Tier III data centre which is not common place in Nigeria. 

“I am pleased with the strides the Exchange is taking in ensuring it is the best in Africa especially through technological innovations. Technology remains one of the drivers of growth for any economy and am impressed that the Exchange is at the forefront of adoption while partnering with other Nigerian companies.”

According to Ade Bajomo, Executive Director, Market Operations and Technology, NSE, the Data Center provides a secure, reliable and advanced physical and technical environment for the Exchange. 

“It comes with real time monitoring of active devices, n+1 resistance of all critical components, 99.982% availability, uninterrupted power supply and market leading cloud hosting capabilities. Data is replicated in real time offsite to a Tier III partner data Centre that is 25km away from the production site. These features place NSE’s services at par with the best exchanges globally”. 

“The new Tier III Data centre re-affirms NSE’s ongoing commitment to digitally transform the Nigerian Capital Market and enable financial inclusion”, he added.

“The NSE Data Center allows the Exchange to strengthen the adoption of digital techniques within its ecosystem and provides our stockbroking firms with the option of hosting their infrastructure in a 24x7 highly available and efficient platform. At the Exchange, we strive to maintain 100% availability of all market platforms and have been very successful in this quest. Currently, 90% of all trades are also done outside the Exchange, in a fully automated manner and the criticality of the data centre is key for market confidence and growith. Our Data Center can currently host 50 clients but can scale up rapidly with demand,” he said.

Speaking on the sustainability aspects of the Data Centre, Bajomo noted that “data centres are one of the highest energy consuming operations in the world and consume around 2% of the total power generated globally. A significant aspect of data centre operating expenses is also related to power usage and the need to be power efficient is critical. At the Exchange, we have chosen our components and cooling strategy carefully to conserve energy”.

The Nigerian Stock Exchange continues to take huge strides in the digitization journey and position itself as a world class Exchange with best-in-class technology. 

“In 2013, we launched X-GEN which is the fastest trading platform in Africa with low latency capabilities. On the back of this, we implemented TradeSmart to assist our Dealing Member firms in achieving a broader reach, leveraging mobile phone penetration in the country,” Bajomo said.

“We have deepened our regulatory capabilities and facilitated the achievement of better compliance and monitoring by both issuers and operators by implementing platforms such as X-ISSUER and X-BOSS. We also recently implemented X-Smart which brings an unprecedented level of surveillance technology into our market place and have a number of market aligned innovative initiatives in the pipeline,” he added.