Digitalizing Ethiopia has indispensible impact for building a robust central government, digital economy as well as connected citizens, so disclosed scholars.
Co-founder of Zenysis Technologies Ethiopians in Tech under Regional Director of Africa, Bernard Laurendeau said that digitized Ethiopia must encompasses information communication technology infrastructure, project management capabilities, public sector organizational management, future citizen education, and tech ecosystem creation. It as well must include certifications and standards, global attractiveness, national initiative delivery, public-private partnership, government cloud, whole of government approach, open financial data, interoperability frameworks.
He added, reliable, easily available, secure, scalable and fast infrastructure is critical to advance the information technology. Moreover, a high capacity, reliable and scalable storage service facilitating fast read and write performance are essential for a healthy ecosystem of modern compute applications.
The use of new technologies, such as machine learning upon big datasets, virtual reality, high resolution photography are causing continually increasing storage demand. And like compute resources, storage is also provisioned as a cloud service by the same large multinational companies with various abstractions offered.
“Current, challenges, in information technology of storage, have included low capacity, low IO, difficult to scale, expensive BCDR and archiving, insecure and not enough skilled, experienced people, no innovation as well as unexpected disruption, customer support and incident response. And hurdles in networking consists low coverage and bandwidth, low speed, high latency, sluggish or no connectivity , single provider, outdated, insecure, government owned, not enough skilled, experienced people, low innovation, unexpected disruption, customer support, incident response. In addition, the other challenges on the information technology
of compute are difficult to acquire HW and implement, outdated HW and SW, disparate, not scalable, and insecure, not enough skilled, experienced people, inexistence of innovation, unexpected disruption, customer support, incident response, ” he added.
As to him, large data centers are operated by big tech companies. Their resources are rented out to business customers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Ali Cloud, Oracle run various datacenters worldwide, particularly, in Ethiopia. And providing reliable network infrastructure for access to existing cloud datacenters from within Ethiopia and incentivizing putting in place of compute infrastructure are critical to modernize information technology.
He added building reliable, available, scalable and secure infrastructure is capital intensive and requires highly skilled engineers. Incentivizing innovation by technologically capable private corporations is critical to advance the information communication technology services. Private corporations are typically incentivized to maximize the extraction of revenue from the systems they create and to divert that revenue to shareholders. And creating a regulatory environment that is mutually beneficial to both the innovating corporations and Ethiopia is paramount to modernize information technology services.
He capitalized that clean water, food production, public safety and security, healthcare services, education and employment, governance and public service, access to financing, risks and regulations, transportation, environment urbanization and energy are some of societal grand challenges that could be addressed with technology.
Lecturer at Addis Ababa University in the department of Computer science, Dr. Mesfin Kefle, on his part, noted that as information communication technology is a recent phenomenon in the country, it goes, actually, not far from a trend of modernization practice in promoting high-definition technology. Within information communication technology, there are about utmost components in the setting of hardware formation, application design, human capitals and information communication technology infrastructural placement.
Adding he mentioned “we have imported hardware devices for installation of information communication technology system. And we have capital incapability for infrastructural building and accessibility of connectivity, enhancing technology culture, implementation and service provision. In order to allow the country utilize the technology properly and appropriately, there should be abundant information baskets and application programs,”
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition, February 2/2020
BY MEHARI BEYENE
