Cloud computing is slowly but surely becoming a leading characteristic of modern business in Nigeria. Companies continue to adopt the technology and migrate their IT onto cloud infrastructure.
Service providers are responding to the growing demand, including MTN Nigeria and the company’s multi-phased launch of a US$235 million data centre.
The move to the cloud carries many implications for software developers and IT teams. Chief among them are those related to cloud-native development – building applications and programs designed for a cloud computing architecture.
Going cloud-native is the right call for many businesses, especially in industries like financial services that rely on IT platforms to deliver faster and more efficient banking solutions to customers.
That said, this decision needs to be coupled with the right development approach, one that supports the full scope of innovation that financial service providers (FSPs) have in store.
The importance of flexibility and choice
The pace of modern technology, and especially the ongoing impact of artificial intelligence (AI), demand that banks and institutions achieve economies of scale in the cloud. It is the only way to guarantee growth and capability.
However, relying on a single major cloud vendor can introduce risks. Companies can face negative circumstances such as a decline in the quality of service, unwanted changes in product offerings, and price increases that upset IT expenditures.
Dependency on a single vendor’s environment also poses a risk to the development of new business applications.
When a business builds a new app on a specific public cloud, those applications can become specific to that environment, creating portability concerns for developers.
By natively developing and hosting an application in one environment and using its specific language and tools, developers can create a dependency that limits application portability and scalability.
Best practices can help organisations maintain flexibility, such as assessing apps before migrating and scrutinising data and workflow dependencies.
The way forward lies with the fundamentals. FSPs need to consider how they build apps, and specifically on what platforms, to retain choice and control.
A new approach to development
Cloud application development offers FSPs many benefits. In a 2024 cloud adoption in Africa survey by McKinsey, all respondents felt confident that their organisations would expand their cloud presence over the next one to three years. Respondents from financial services predicted the highest rate of increase in public- and private-cloud growth on average.
Cloud app development offers improved performance as computations take place on the server side, as well as increased uptime, scalability, security, and streamlined updates via large-scale deployment. However, developing in the cloud requires businesses to adopt and adhere to practices across all IT arenas, including SecOps and DevOps practices, and new virtualisation technologies.
This includes implementing containerization, where developers package software with all its essential components and dependencies.
With the ability to share the host machine’s operating system kernel, containers negate the need for individual operating systems.
This allows applications to run consistently on any infrastructure while developers can work in them using the same toolsets.
By supporting continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, FSPs and their development teams can deliver apps more quickly and efficiently.
The best kind of banking
Consumers prefer a banking experience that is simple, streamlined, and intuitive. West Africa’s financial sector and their developers need the same from their technology. Part of modernising IT infrastructure to support cloud-native applications is investing in hybrid cloud solutions that serve as a foundation for building and scaling them.
A solution like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers developers a consistent experience across different environments while enabling them to deploy and manage applications using their existing tools and frameworks.
A flexible foundation also helps FSPs in Nigeria prepare for the adoption of AI. Development teams need platforms built to handle intelligent applications.
At the same time, they can optimise time and resources spent throughout the app lifecycle.
This is critical as conversations surrounding AI, in both financial services and other industries, are starting to move away from training models and towards using them to generate business value.
Moving to and working in the cloud demand a change in mindset by institutions and developers.
By collaborating closely with trusted partners and knowing what foundation to lay, banks and FSPs in Nigeria can make their investments go further and maintain the freedom to innovate for the future.
