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Nigeria: Uwaje Unveils Roadmap to Digital Security
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This Day (Lagos)
23 July 2008
Posted to the web 24 July 2008
Efem Nkanga
Lagos
President of Global Network for Cybersolutions, Dr Chris Nwaje, has said that the engine room of future information societies lies in the information infrastructure.
Dr Uwaje, who made this known in a paper delivered at a forum on digital security recently emphasised that software is the heart of this information infrastructure and will be the main determinant of future global development competition.
Has said that digital disasters have started occurring across the globe and warned that damages done to data will be significantly colossal if something is not done to arrest the trend.
He warned nations that to exclude digital disaster as an essential parameter for national planning and indeed as one of the inevitable major national catastrophes of the global IT evolution cycle is a costly mistake.
Dr Uwaje who gave some statistics on digital disaster singled out the United States as one of the core originating domains when evaluating digital development and disasters in general.
Unveiling some referenced statistics about U.S. data loss, Uwaje quoted a strategic Research Institute report that said: "six per cent of all PCs suffer an episode of data loss in any given year. Given the number of PCs used in US businesses in 1998, that translates to approximately 4.6 million data loss episodes."
The article added that "30 per cent of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. Seventy percent fail within five years. While "93% of companies that lost their data centre for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington) .Companies that aren't able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive."
Uwaje also quoted another report from a ZDNet Security News Article dated January 2004, which stated that "Computer virus attacks cost global businesses an estimated $55 billion in damages in 2003, a sum that is expected to increase this year.
"Companies lost roughly $20 billion to $30 billion in 2002 from the virus attacks, up from about $13 billion in 2001", he said.
Uwaje called on the government to re-evaluate the state and position of the national IT Development Cycle.
He also emphasised that it takes little intellect to appropriate the national wealth in oil, but ultimately nations succeed in creating national prosperity by consciously and proactively ensuring a forward-looking, dynamic, innovative, and challenging local environment.
"In the 21st century service-oriented economy, the role of a nation's policy-makers has grown as the basis of competition has shifted more and more to the creation and assimilation of knowledge", he noted.
Warning that the early signs of impending Digital Disaster for Nigeria may have started to show, Uwaje said that the first sign is the faulty strategic policy preference for the wholesale import of the products of technology (physical technology products) against that of developing the technology knowledge processes and human capacities for its development and sustainability.
He added that secondly, Indigenous Application Software Engineering development process, which should be strategically protected has been left totally unguarded.
Decrying the fact that Nigerians still import and use over 45million cell phones and manufactures none, he emphasised that it is a further disaster that 99.9 per cent of those cell phone being used have not been registered into a national software database.
He said that the digital disaster that will emanate from whole sale Digital Consumption (DC) can only lead to quantum damages with enormous cost in Disaster Recovery.
"Yesterday, global development lessons for the survival of societies and nations of the future was boldly written and documented within the development context and processes of the 19th Century. As we forge ahead in the 21st Century, the greatest challenge facing all nations will no more be the Digital Divide challenge, but the Digital Disaster nightmare - a national nightmare with recurring decimals in Nano dimensions! Lessons from the global 19th century development curve have shown that science and technology spurred by Research and Development (R&D) formed the bedrock of classification of the growth and development status of nations - this created the industrial divide", he stated.
He reiterated that the greatest danger to any nation in this digital and electronic knowledge age, resides in the software domain.
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e-Government operations and services, he emphasised should not be contracted to foreigners but specially restricted and carefully guarded by indigenous human resources. This according to him, is essential given the fact that the preparation for an effective digital disaster management policy will be determined by the efforts of each nation on how timely and effectively she addresses the issue of its National Informatics Development Policy - both in its framework design, implementation, scalability and sustainability.
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