SERVICE LINE
Cloud & Data Centre
Tier-III-aligned facilities, colocation, hybrid cloud landing zones and disaster recovery you can actually invoke. Built and run from Kano by engineers who understand Nigerian power, Nigerian bandwidth and Nigerian data residency law.
Infrastructure designed for the conditions it will actually face
Engr. Bashir Lawal Gezawa leads the Infrastructure & Cloud practice, a team of forty-one engineers who design, build and operate the physical and virtual estate our clients run on. The practice grew out of a hard local truth: infrastructure designs imported wholesale from Europe or the Gulf fail in Nigeria, because they assume grid power that does not fail eleven times a month, ambient temperatures that do not touch forty-two degrees in April, and single-carrier fibre that does not get cut by a road contractor. Every facility we design starts from measured local conditions — grid availability, harmattan dust load, humidity, fuel logistics, carrier diversity — and works backwards to a resilience target the client can afford to sustain.
We build and refit data centres to Tier-III-aligned standards, meaning concurrently maintainable power and cooling: dual power paths, N+1 uninterruptible power supplies, generator sets with automatic transfer and at least seventy-two hours of fuel, precision in-row cooling with hot and cold aisle containment, VESDA aspirating smoke detection, clean-agent suppression, biometric access control, environmental monitoring and a building management system that tells you about a rising inlet temperature before it becomes an outage. Where a client has an ageing server room rather than a data centre, a refit is usually cheaper and faster than a new build, and we say so.
Alongside the physical estate we operate BrilliantCloud, our own virtualisation and colocation platform in Kano, and we design hybrid architectures that place workloads where they belong. Landing zones on AWS and Microsoft Azure are built to the vendors’ well-architected guidance with account separation, network segmentation, centralised logging, cost guardrails and infrastructure-as-code from day one. Data subject to Nigerian residency obligations stays in Nigeria; elastic, non-personal and burst workloads go to public cloud. Solar-hybrid power now supplies a meaningful share of our Kano facility load, which both reduces diesel cost and improves our clients’ carbon reporting.
Infrastructure services
From a concrete slab to a running landing zone, with the operational discipline to keep it running afterwards.
Data centre build and refit
Tier-III-aligned
Feasibility, electrical and mechanical design, containment, precision cooling, fire detection and suppression, access control, commissioning and integrated systems testing.
Colocation
Kano facility
Quarter, half and full racks with dual power feeds, carrier-diverse connectivity, smart-hands support and 24/7 escorted access for client engineers.
Hybrid and public cloud
AWS and Azure
Landing zone design, account and subscription structure, network segmentation, identity integration, cost guardrails and infrastructure-as-code in Terraform.
Virtualisation and private cloud
VMware and Proxmox
Compute and storage clusters, software-defined networking, self-service provisioning, capacity management and lifecycle patching of the hypervisor estate.
Backup and disaster recovery
Tested, not assumed
Immutable backup, offsite replication to a second Nigerian site, documented recovery runbooks and scheduled failover exercises with a written test report.
Power and cooling
Built for the grid we have
N+1 UPS, generator and automatic transfer switching, solar-hybrid arrays with lithium storage, in-row precision cooling and containment, and full environmental telemetry.
What we hold ourselves to
99.95%
Uptime attained
Hosted and managed estate, FY2025
15 min
Best-tier RPO
Continuous replication tier
4 hrs
Best-tier RTO
Warm standby with rehearsed failover
72 hrs
On-site fuel autonomy
Kano facility at full design load
Disaster recovery tiers
Recovery is a commercial decision before it is a technical one. These four tiers cover almost every requirement we are asked to meet. Indicative monthly costs assume a mid-sized estate of roughly twenty virtual machines and eight terabytes of protected data, and exclude VAT and carrier charges.
| Tier | Design | RTO | RPO | Indicative monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 — Backup and restore | Nightly immutable backup with offsite copy; rebuild onto available capacity when needed | 48 – 72 hours | 24 hours | ₦620,000 |
| Tier 2 — Cold standby | Reserved capacity at the second site, images pre-staged, configuration held as code | 12 – 24 hours | 4 hours | ₦1,450,000 |
| Tier 3 — Warm standby | Continuously replicated virtual machines held powered-down; database log shipping every 15 minutes | 4 hours | 15 minutes | ₦3,200,000 |
| Tier 4 — Active-active | Both sites live behind a global load balancer with synchronous database replication | Under 15 minutes | Near zero | ₦7,800,000 |
How a migration runs
Whether the destination is our Kano facility, a public cloud landing zone or a hybrid of both, the sequence is the same. Nothing is moved until it has been moved successfully in a rehearsal.
Discover and inventory
Automated discovery across the estate produces an inventory of every server, application, database, interface and licence, with dependency mapping and measured utilisation over at least two weeks of normal operation.
Assess and choose a disposition
Each workload is assigned a disposition — retire, retain, rehost, replatform, refactor or replace — with the cost and risk of each option quantified. Roughly a fifth of workloads in a typical estate turn out to be retirable, which pays for a good deal of the migration.
Design the target and the landing zone
Network segmentation, identity integration, backup policy, monitoring, tagging and cost controls are all defined and built as code before the first workload moves, so that governance is inherited rather than retrofitted.
Pilot with a low-risk wave
A first wave of three to five non-critical workloads proves the tooling, the runbook, the cutover window and the rollback. Lessons from the pilot are written back into the runbook before wave two is scheduled.
Migrate in waves
Workloads move in dependency-aware waves, each with a rehearsed cutover, a data reconciliation step, a named business approver and a rollback point. Waves are scheduled around month-end, payroll and statutory reporting cycles.
Optimise and hand over
After stabilisation we right-size compute, tune storage tiers, remove orphaned resources and re-baseline cost. The client receives as-built documentation, runbooks, dashboards and, if wanted, a managed-service retainer.
Data residency and NDPR compliance
Personal data relating to Nigerian data subjects is subject to the Nigeria Data Protection Act and the NDPR framework administered by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission. Several categories of public-sector and financial data are additionally required by sector regulators to be held within Nigeria. Our Kano facility and our second Nigerian site exist so that clients can meet those obligations without giving up modern infrastructure.
Where a hybrid design sends any workload to a region outside Nigeria, we document exactly what data crosses the border, on what lawful basis, under which contractual safeguards, and how it can be repatriated. That analysis is delivered as a written data residency assessment before migration begins, not as an afterthought during an audit. Questions on residency and processing agreements go to [email protected].
Frequently asked questions
What does "Tier-III-aligned" mean, exactly?
How do you handle grid failure and fuel supply?
Do you test disaster recovery or just sell it?
Can we keep some workloads on-premises?
What does colocation at the Kano facility cost?
Are you tied to a single cloud vendor?
Server room at capacity, or a recovery plan nobody has ever tested?
We will survey the site, measure the real load and power profile, and give you a costed options paper covering refit, colocation and cloud — with the numbers that make the case either way.