The two-day conference, themed “The Big Bold Step,” brought together telecoms operators, global technology firms, startups, investors, students and public-sector leaders at Landmark Event Centre to discuss what it will take for Africa to stop lagging and start building platforms of its own.

From keynote sessions to fireside chats and product showcases, the conference stressed that the limitations initially preventing African companies from competing at scale are fading away, but hesitation remains highly expensive.

Glory Olamigoke, co-founder and co-convener of Tech Revolution Africa, said the conference was designed to close a persistent gap in the ecosystem.

“We are trying to solve a number of problems and close a number of gaps, but perhaps the most critical one is bridging the gap between the early stage innovators, builders, founders in the ecosystem and the leaders in the space,” he said.

Unlike typical industry gatherings, Olamigoke said the event was intentionally structured to bring founders and decision-makers into the same room, while also extending its reach beyond established stakeholders.

“We are going all the way down to the secondary schools, the primary schools, because we believe that if we can start to culture these young ones, then we will be able to influence the next generation,” he said, pointing to the student tech debates introduced at this year’s edition.

That emphasis on long-term capacity building was reiterated through the day’s conversations, including a fireside chat with the Federal Government, represented by Lagos State Commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, Olatunbosun Alake.

Drawing from Nigeria’s reputation challenges abroad, Alake said that while technology is important, Africa’s potential cannot be realised without addressing surrounding challenges, including Nigeria’s image abroad.

“It’s not a technology conversation,” he said. “It’s a conversation that is at the very bottom of the motivation behind everything.”

He urged young professionals to engage the public sector rather than avoid it, describing the work as difficult but impactful. “By all means, do that, because you will have an impact, but make sure that your principles and your values remain strong,” he said.

MTN Nigeria’s keynote on the digital economy forecast for 2026, delivered by its Chief Information Officer, Shoyinka Shodunke, went beyond a focus on growth projections. 

Shodunke traced Africa’s marginal role across previous industrial revolutions and warned that the fourth leaves little room for delay.

“The inputs today are data, and where’s the factory? The factory sits in the cloud,” he said, adding that talent is no longer bound by geography and computing power no longer requires heavy capital outlay.

He pointed to cloud subscriptions available “at $50” compared to six-figure infrastructure costs in the past, arguing that scale is now accessible to startups and enterprises alike. But he warned that comfort with legacy revenue streams could still hold organisations back.

“You cannot live with a legacy mindset, a fear of disruption, or the comfort of mediocrity,” Shodunke said.

Using MTN as a case study, he explained how the telecoms giant has had to intentionally disrupt itself, moving beyond voice and data into cloud services, fintech and intelligent platforms layered on top of its network infrastructure.

The focus on infrastructure continued during MTN’s product showcase, where Onome Ologe and Tobechukwu Ajoku outlined the company’s local cloud services, emphasising data residency, naira-based pricing and predictable operating costs for Nigerian businesses.

“If you’re a CFO or a founder and you need to know cost accountability, you can go to sleep,” Ajoku said, noting that pricing remains stable regardless of foreign exchange volatility.

From infrastructure, the conversation at Tech Revolution Africa 2.0 moved into data and artificial intelligence during a presentation by Ligadata’s Mike Penner, who revealed the scale of its partnership with MTN Nigeria’s data operations.

“We now are running at 1.2 trillion pet records, 1.4 million records per second,” Penner said, describing a system designed to turn fragmented enterprise data into real-time, actionable intelligence.

“What we’ve done over the past few years at MTN together is something extraordinary,” he said, adding that the goal was not experimentation but measurable value creation.

Penner noted that African enterprises must treat data and knowledge as sovereign assets, warning against outsourcing intelligence without understanding what drives it.

That theme of sovereignty and control resurfaced during a panel on open innovation and hybrid platforms featuring executives from Red Hat and Redington. 

Speakers explained that open-source software and hybrid cloud models offer African companies flexibility without locking them into single platforms or geographies.

“Open source is driving innovation.” It is a condition of innovation, particularly for startups seeking speed without prohibitive expenses.

During a fireside chat on Global Tech & the African Market, Soji Maurice-Diya, CEO of ntel (NatCom), emphasized the need for Africa to focus on solving its own problems rather than simply chasing global trends.

He said, “Nobody’s going to solve our problems for us. Yes, we need global access, we need all the technology that’s available, taper all of the solutions and build our own solutions.”

Maurice-Diya added that African companies should prioritise innovation that addresses local challenges, ensuring technology creates measurable impact rather than just replicating global models.

Equinix’s Ayomide Jones, EMEA Business Development, West Africa, also spoke on the role of interconnection in Africa’s digital growth. She highlighted how networks, content and cloud providers work together to enhance modern businesses. 

“Everything we use nowadays to solve our problems is content. This is only possible because of interconnection,” Jones said. 

She explained that Equinix’s data centres in Lagos and across Africa enable startups and enterprises to connect to cloud services, financial systems, and global platforms without heavy upfront investment, creating the infrastructure that allows African businesses to scale quickly.

For all the talk of opportunity, speakers repeatedly returned to execution as the differentiator. “We always talk, so now, let’s go back and execute,” Olamigoke said.

Day Two of Tech Revolution Africa Conference 2.0 continues on Saturday, with further sessions on policy, investment, emerging technologies and the role of African enterprises in strengthening the continent’s digital economy.

Part of that focus involves realising the region’s data sovereignty.

Earlier this year, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the Data Protection Bill 2023 into law, concluding a years-long effort to effectively regulate the processing and protection of personal data.

The bill provides for data protection principles that are common to internationally recognised frameworks and obligations for “controllers” and “processors”, referring to organisations that gather and store personal data.

This should prompt enterprises to consider their data residency business strategies and how they can adhere to local and international laws.

While cloud computing in Nigeria may be on the rise, many local enterprises still face limited options. For many, a hybrid approach is the way forward.

Compliance is critical

Enterprises need to be fully compliant when handling other people’s data, including employees, clients, suppliers, and more.

As the term implies, data compliance refers to the applicable governance for data protection, security, storage, and other related activities.

Both public and private organisations need to ensure data is protected from unauthorised access and use.

Over the last several years, we have witnessed efforts to standardise data handling regulation, with notable frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) developed by the European Union (EU) and frameworks put forward by many individual nations.

Organisations that don’t comply or protect customer data face several risks. They can be more susceptible to data breaches, leading to cybercrimes such as identity theft and financial fraud.

Breaches can subsequently damage an organisation’s reputation and result in legal repercussions from affected parties and fines from regulatory bodies.

Even in the case of minor incidents, companies waste time, energy, and resources in repair and recovery efforts, resulting in lowered productivity levels.

A duty of care towards data

Nigeria’s leveraging of data comes at a time when cloud computing is becoming the new standard for enterprise IT.

Recent studies indicate that the approach has the potential to generate trillions of naira in additional economic value by the 2030s and enhance local enterprises’ internet-based database capabilities.

Cloud computing adoption is being driven by several factors, most significantly, new models of work and the emergence of the hybrid workforce, evolving customer needs, and a growing ecosystem of hyperscalers and integrators.

Organisations that use the cloud to store data may have a responsibility to store that data in the country of origin, depending on that country’s regulatory requirements.

This can be a concern for enterprises that use hosted services as they may not know where their data is physically located.

Under Nigeria’s new Data Protection Act, data controllers and processors must seek the services of a data protection compliance organisation (DPCO) to perform audits and ensure enterprises are meeting their regulatory obligations.

Remember, the cloud is flexible, meaning that the hardware on which specific data is stored can be located anywhere in the world.

In light of that, enterprises need to carefully consider their IT infrastructure and approach to migrating to cloud-based services and systems.

Taking control with the hybrid cloud

According to the Red Hat 2023 Global Tech Outlook, cloud infrastructure was in the top three of companies’ leading IT technology funding priorities, with hybrid cloud strategies continuing to dominate as companies look to transform digitally.

Hybrid cloud combines on-premise, third-party private cloud providers, and public cloud vendors to create a single entity capable of moving workloads between environments.

The hybrid cloud offers several advantages for enterprises, such as greater flexibility, cost savings, and security. However, it also offers a major advantage in adhering to data compliance and residency obligations.

With a hybrid cloud, an organisation can operate and move workloads according to the regulatory landscape.

Availability zones, such as those offered by major cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud, means Nigerian enterprises can assert further control over where their data resides.

A hybrid cloud is not the optimal solution for every organisation. But, as Nigeria’s digital landscape expands and organisations’ responsibilities to customers and data evolve, so too must the technologies we utilise to adhere to them.

By working with enterprise IT and cloud vendors, organisations can invest in the systems that best suit their needs and obligations and let them exercise full control over their data.

However, events of the past two years have highlighted the need to digitally transform traditional approaches as employees and customers expect instant and always-on access to data and solutions.

It goes without saying that the cloud is here to stay, so the next step is for local businesses to truly embrace this high-performance computing environment if they are to remain relevant.

Technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are mainstream and deliver value to companies regardless of size or industry sector.

The growing adoption of these advanced solutions is contributing to an explosion of data as engagement channels continue to increase.

Whether it is for real-time analytics, managing customer self-service requests, or live streaming conferences, data has become the currency of our connected world. And again, the only way to effectively leverage all this data is to use the cloud.

A high performing world

The building blocks of this high-performance computing environment consist of compute, network, and storage.

To build such an architecture, compute servers are networked into a cluster. These are used to run software and algorithms from a data processing perspective. In turn, the cluster is networked to the data storage and captures the output.

What differentiates this high-performance computing environment is that these elements keep pace with one another to ensure the company can complete a diverse set of tasks.

Use cases vary but can include everything from boosting the performance of research laboratories to enabling artificial intelligence to automatically flag credit card fraud and simulate scenarios before implementing solutions.

Of course, the cloud requires solutions that can deliver the performance, reliability, scalability, and security essential for a rapidly changing marketplace.

Companies must discuss these components with potential cloud service provider partners before embarking on any migration to ensure they can deliver on their specific expectations.

Hybrid alternative

That is not to say that a business needs to rely only on a singular cloud provider to deliver on all required capabilities. If anything, a hybrid and multi-cloud approach is preferred as the organisation can leverage the specific strengths of each service provider to realise the value of high-performance computing.

In fact, as people demand faster access to more data, a hybrid cloud is becoming a business imperative. For this to work, a fundamental shift in network design must capitalise on the agility and scalability offered.

This has already seen data centres migrate from the traditional three-tier architecture to what is known as a leaf-spine one.

The leaf-spine architecture supports the high volume of data generated within the data centre thanks to numerous servers collaborating to serve applications. Effectively, this mesh network connectivity enables applications to be paired with any server while delivering a layer of redundancy for failovers if required.

Moreover, these hybrid clouds’ network availability and latency will continue to improve as more advanced technologies become available.

Data centres must ensure that network management in the cloud adapts as needs change. Fortunately, there are automated infrastructure management tools available that can track every connection while also providing data centre managers with real-time information, highlighting where improvements to the network can be made.

Building capacity

Even with all this in place, data centre capacity must be taken into consideration. This is where the human factor becomes vital – the technology can only do so much on its own. Artificial intelligence and machine learning still require experienced human operators to unlock value completely.

It is, therefore, the people working at the data centre that can inject the desired level of agility into operational systems. Even though companies themselves must be agile, the high performing computing capabilities of the modern data centres also need to be continually evolving to provide customers with flexibility and scalability.

Unfortunately, the capacity of people inside the data centre is still limited. To free this up, data centres should implement hyperconverged infrastructure that delivers the performance, administrative simplicity, and ability to grow as per requirements.

The data centre needs to incorporate intelligent tools that enable orchestration and automation across domains and deliver the insights required to address any potential network gaps proactively.

This is a new era of cloud computing and one in which both the companies and the service providers they use need to adapt and embrace change. The high-performance computing capabilities of the cloud are too beneficial to ignore.