Challenge

Credequity is a medium scale company located in Lagos, Nigeria focused on health care, insurance, lifestyle commitments like rent, car or equipment purchase and school fees.

Credequity has a proprietary risk analysis platform. The services helps businesses break up bulk payments into smaller Instalments and assured collection. This gives them access to data of millions of customers and mobile banking subscribers.

Credequity has a range of solutions and existing virtual machines outside Nigeria. Primarily, they needed a cloud service provider to provide them with local data residency. A number of these applications require access to the database of Nigerian Identity Management Company’s portal for effective performance. In line with NITDA’s regulation demanding that all data be hosted in Nigeria, Credequity needed a reliable partner to provide them with the required Cloud services.

They also needed a Cloud Service Provider that would guarantee low latency and ease of scaling their resources on short notice. Their preference was that all of these existed in a safe environment within Nigeria. 

Criteria

Credequity was looking forward to a cost efficient and flexible payment option with the advantages of scalability and proper data security for their range of solutions. Consequently, Credequity prioritized the following as selection criteria for a Cloud partner in Nigeria:

 

Low cost – Layer3Cloud was able to provide Credequity with a flexible payment in local Nigerian currency which nullified attendant hassle associated with the acquisition of foreign exchange to pay for services hosted abroad.

 

Low Latency – This has remained a unique selling point for Layer3Cloud. Since Layer3Cloud runs out of data centers in Nigeria with connection to the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, low latency and faster access to applications is guaranteed.

 

Security – Layer3Cloud is built with the highest standards of security controls and processes, monitored round the clock from Layer3’s Security Operations Center. This provides a safe and secure platform to customers and hosted applications.

 

Scalability – Due to the rapid demand for resources, Credequity needed a solution they could scale up on short notice and Layer3Cloud’s platform was designed to provide that.  

Result

Layer3Cloud deployed a virtual machine using the requested resources on its cloud environment. A guest Operating System was configured as well as backup.

The success criteria included:

1. Ability to access the cloud portal from any location.

 

2. Ability to access the vServer and manage it (Power on, Power off, Reset, View Console and interact with guest OS)

 

3. Ability to access Tier-1 and Tier-2 support (support via ticketing) with a <5hour response time by a pool of shared support representative/engineers.

 

Credequity eventually upgraded to a Virtual Data Centre (vDC) after migrating two (2) servers from Google Cloud.