Firms Partner against Cyber Attacks in Nigeria

Stories by Emma Okonji

21st Century Technologies Limited, an ICT firm in Nigeria has partnered Nexusguard, a DDoS security solution provider to unveil DDoS scrubbing centre in Nigeria that will provide DDoS mitigation service to enterprise and government agencies.

Chairman, 21st Century Technologies, Wale Ajisebutu, who made the disclosure at the unveiling of the solution to banks and enterprises in Lagos, said: “We opted to partner with Nexusguard because of their global reach and robustness of their platform. They have helped many companies and governments globally defend against cyberattacks.”

According to him, Nexusguard is consistently recognised by analysts such as Gartner and Forrester as a market leader. Customers that choose to take advantage of our new compelling cybersecuritysolution will surely capture enormous opportunities for unlimited growth,” he said.

With DDoS risk increasing worldwide, service providers are updating their capabilities to provide not only bandwidth and subscriptions, but also cybersecurity.

The transformation, known as Telco 5.0, demands the methodology and mechanics to shift platforms, people and processes to provide optimal security. Nexusguard fulfils that need with its global scrubbing cloud. Paired with 21st Century Technologies’s local capacity, the companies are now prepared to provide a seamless “global+local” scrubbing network that detects and mitigates both international and local DDoS attacks, simultaneously.

Vice President, Sales at Nexusguard, Jeremy Lee, said: “We have exclusive partnership with 21st Century Limited in Nigeria. This is a strategic technology alliance in which we are going to integrate our technology to the 21st Century’s. The Company will provide all the local skills to tackle all the issues within the country while Nexusguard will be on the backend supporting them in terms of zeroing the attacks. So, we are offering them supports to meet the market needs.”

Speaking on effects of DDoS attacks to businesses and countries, Lee said: “DDoS is becoming a global problem. More countries are faced with DDoS attacks at the national level. So, in Africa we observed that South Africa was under attack last month. One of the telcos was brought down for 10 days or more. So, with partnership of this nature we have with 21st Century will assist service providers to take care of (potential) attacks, clean the traffic and then protect the business from going down”.

He said businesses, especially banks that subscribe to services and applications should be able to get on-premise firewalls, subscribe to secured internet links like the services that 21st Century provides. They have to stay ahead such that when attacks occur they can be able to mitigate it before it gets to their data centre.