Low-latency and scalable cloud services for a government parastatal 

Industry – Public Sector 

Challenge – The Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) is the Federal Government of Nigeria’s apex institution for the promotion, development, and diversification of exports. 

NEPC was looking to acquire servers but due to the small size of their requirements and projected growth over time, purchasing physical servers was not an option. The only viable option was to get virtual machines. 

Scalability and cost were the key factors that drove the decision to seek out Cloud Service Providers.   

Selection Criteria – The Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) was looking for a close working relationship with a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with the assurance of easy and timely access to support. NEPC prioritized low latency and local data residency in compliance with NITDA local residency policy and a budget friendly service in their choice for a CSP. Layer3Cloud was selected owing to the following: 

Easy access to support and professionalism – NEPC, alongside their consultants, were impressed with the level of professionalism exhibited by the Layer3Cloud engineering team. NEPC desired a working relationship that provided immediate response to queries and concerns; the Layer3Cloud engineers and support team was able to provide that in a timely manner. 

Cost – Layer3Cloud was able to proffer a solution with specific consideration of NEPC’s budget. 

Low Latency – A solution hosted in Nigeria which easily solves any latency issues that might arise. 

Scalability – Layer3Cloud was able to provide a solution that effectively monitors consumed resources. The vDC solution also allows them scale resources as needed. 

The Result – Layer3Cloud provisioned a Virtual Data Centre vDC which comprises of 4 virtual machines on its cloud portal using their requested resources. The guest operating systems were installed and networking, configured. Configuration for performance monitoring, Veeam backup and replication, firewall and load balancer were also implemented. 

Layer3Cloud provided NEPC with the 

• Possibility of accessing the cloud portal from any location 
• Ability to access the vDC and the vApps (Power on, Power off, Reset, View Console and interact with guest OS) 
• Ability to monitor service usage and performance metrics via the platform 
• Access to tier 1 and tier 2 support (support via ticketing) with a <5 hour response time by a pool of shared support reps/engineers