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As demand for secure, locally hosted cloud services grows, Temitayo Jaiyeola speaks with Olusola Adenuga, the chief executive officer of Olla Systems, about increasing adoption, data sovereignty, regulatory pressures, and the intricacies of building compliant local infrastructure for banks, governments, and digital businesses.
Olla Systems recently achieved PCI DSS and ISO certifications. What do these certifications represent for the company and its clients?
These certifications reflect adherence to international standards in data security and business continuity. For clients across various industries, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, e-commerce, and government, they provide assurance that the systems managing their data meet recognised global benchmarks. In an environment where breaches can affect customer trust and business operations, this level of compliance has become a basic expectation rather than a competitive edge.
You previously served as a bank’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and now lead a cloud infrastructure company. How has that experience shaped your perspective?
Working in banking offered a close view of the regulatory, security, and operational demands of highly scrutinised industries. That experience informs how we build and manage infrastructure, especially around risk, compliance, and reliability. For organisations operating under regulatory oversight, it is important that their cloud infrastructure is designed with these considerations built in, not bolted on later. This enables us to remove complexity for CIOs and CTOs so they can innovate faster without worrying about regulatory pitfalls.
What major shifts have you seen in how organisations across Africa approach IT security and infrastructure?
The biggest shift is that security has moved from being a back-office concern to a board-level issue. It is now seen as central to business continuity, customer trust, and regulatory compliance. Digital-first business models, especially in finance and payments, have made organisations more sensitive to infrastructure design decisions, particularly around resilience and data control.
Also, there is growing awareness that infrastructure decisions directly impact business agility, user experience, and regulatory risk, which was not the case a decade ago.
Why is there growing interest in locally hosted cloud services, especially in regulated sectors like banking and government?
Local cloud infrastructure addresses several critical needs. Firstly, regulatory requirements are increasingly mandating data residency, keeping critical data local, whether citizen or financial data, within national borders. Secondly, local cloud reduces latency, which improves application performance and user experience. Finally, it reduces exposure to foreign exchange volatility and geopolitical risks tied to offshore hosting. For banks, e-commerce platforms, and governments, these factors directly affect operational resilience, compliance, and cost predictability.
How is OllaCloud positioned within this context of local compliance and infrastructure demand?
OllaCloud was developed with an emphasis on aligning with local data and security regulations while delivering enterprise-grade performance. Our differentiation lies in three areas: compliance, proximity, and partnership. Compliance because we integrate standards like PCI DSS, ISO 27001: 2022 and ISO 22301, Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR), and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) guidelines into our architecture. Proximity because our data centres are local, giving clients low-latency connectivity and data residency compliance. And partnership because we see ourselves not just as infrastructure providers, but as committed stakeholders helping clients navigate their regulatory and digital transformation journeys.
What is the company’s approach to helping clients comply with evolving regulations while maintaining operational flexibility?
We achieve this by embedding compliance as a foundational design principle rather than as an add-on. Our infrastructure is hosted locally and meets regulators’ expectations. This ensures clients can deploy cloud-native solutions while satisfying data residency, privacy, and sector-specific mandates. We also engage continuously with regulators to stay ahead of emerging guidelines, ensuring our clients remain compliant without stifling their innovation pipelines. We are strong advocates of local data hosted locally and work with enterprises willing to migrate critical data into the local cloud.
How does the company balance scalability with regulatory and performance expectations from both startups and large enterprises?
OllaCloud is modular and scalable. Companies can launch quickly with our standard secure configurations, while enterprises can customise controls to align with internal policies. The infrastructure is built to accommodate scale, without requiring clients to compromise on either compliance or performance as they grow.
This balance is crucial in today’s competitive environment, where agility and trust are both business imperatives. We are also partners with global companies, such as Oracle, among others.
What concerns are most commonly raised by enterprise clients considering cloud adoption?
Data security, regulatory risk, service reliability, and vendor lock-in are recurring themes. We address these by ensuring our platforms meet stringent security standards like PCI DSS and ISO, maintaining transparent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for uptime, and building our solutions on open standards to reduce lock-in fears. Additionally, our local presence reassures clients that we understand the unique regulatory and operational environments they operate in, and we are very accessible too.
The company recently supported a traditional bank with a cloud infrastructure upgrade. What insights emerged from that experience?
The most important takeaway was that cloud migration is not solely a technology decision; it involves business, compliance, and risk teams from the start.
Cloud migration is not just an IT decision; it is a strategic business move. The bank’s migration to on-prem cloud helped it to steadily outpace its peers in operational efficiency and innovation agility. Another lesson was the need for phased migration with robust testing at each stage to ensure business continuity.
Finally, for banks, it is important to work with a local partner familiar with both banking regulations and cloud infrastructure to accelerate timelines and reduce compliance risks.
What should CIOs and CTOs in regulated sectors consider before adopting cloud services?
They need to begin with a clear understanding of their regulatory obligations and internal risk appetite. It is also important to view the cloud as a shared responsibility, not as a loss of control. Choose partners that are transparent and regulation-aware and will support you through every stage – design, migration, and compliance – ensuring your journey to the cloud strengthens rather than compromises your operational integrity.
There is growing international interest in Africa’s digital infrastructure. How can countries and companies respond while preserving data sovereignty?
Africa’s digital sovereignty hinges on deliberate policy, local investment, and regional collaboration. Governments should prioritise regulatory frameworks that encourage data domiciliation, protect citizens’ data, and create incentives for local infrastructure buildout. But it is not only about policies; what is more important is creating an enabling environment for the private sector to thrive and flourish.
When enabled, private sector players will invest in indigenous capacity, building data centres, cloud platforms, and talent pipelines that keep Africa’s data within Africa. Sovereignty does not mean isolation; it is about ensuring Africans can store, process, and govern their data locally while remaining connected to global markets on our terms.
What will it take for Africa’s digital infrastructure to scale in line with innovation demands?
Scaling requires a two-pronged approach: accelerating investments in critical infrastructure, such as data centres, fibre, interconnection hubs, as well as the hardware required, as this is a critical component for innovation. We must address barriers like power costs, licensing complexity, and limited local financing.
With growing interest in AI, how is the company preparing its infrastructure to support AI workloads?
AI workloads demand three key ingredients: compute power, secure environments, and proximity to data sources. Our cloud infrastructure is designed with high-performance computing nodes, scalable GPU capabilities and offered out of Nigerian Tier III+ certified data centres, to support data sovereignty. We are also exploring strategic partnerships to bring AI-optimised infrastructure to market, ensuring that African enterprises can build, train, and deploy models without compromising on performance or compliance.
Downtime and cyberattacks can be devastating. What investments have you made in ensuring infrastructure resilience and business continuity for your clients?
Our investment strategy prioritises building resilience into the core of our platform from day one. While we are actively scaling our infrastructure towards future geographic distribution, we deliver robust protection through a highly redundant, enterprise-grade architecture within our secure facility. This includes active-active clusters, redundant networking, and resilient storage, all designed to minimise single points of failure. We implement continuous backups stored safely within our ecosystem. Combined with comprehensive disaster recovery planning and testing, this layered approach ensures significant protection and business continuity for our clients.