Zoho, leading multinational technology and web-based business
tools solutions provider was voted the Pan African Tech Company of the Year at the 2023 Titans of Tech Africa Awards. The Company also Clinched the Tech Team of the Year at the hi-octane event.
In a citation read by Don Pedro Aganbi, Executive Secretary, Titans of Tech Africa Awards said that Zoho constantly seeks to make the adoption of its applications both simple and affordable. He noted that as part of its survive-and-serve strategy, Zoho started providing its world-class software solutions at a fair price, protected from exchange rate fluctuations. The firm also conducts training sessions aimed specifically at the African market, educating users about how to adopt cloud technology to grow their businesses.
Don Pedro Aganbi noted that The Titans of Tech Awards is a platform dedicated to recognizing the achievements, successes, and triumphs of key stakeholders across the entire digital technology spectrum and telling the stories. He insisted that awards are a great way to encourage good behaviour, inculcate competitive spirit and spur the industry to greater heights.
He said that some of the key criteria used in arriving at the winners include value of the service or technology in solving recognised technology problems, meeting network requirements, optmising service and performance, overall quality of innovation and contribution to ICT advancement, consistency and vision, market acceptance and efficiency.
Declaring the award ceremony open, Chairman of the Occasion, Femi Pedro, a pioneer Banker and former Deputy Governor of Lagos praised the organiser of the Titans of Tech Africa Award for its consistency over the years. He noted that in recognising excellence, celebrating commitment and rewarding winners, the Titans of Tech Awards is contributing to efforts at building the nation’s telecommunications industry.
The Titans of Tech Africa Awards popularly called Nigeria’s Tech Industry Grammy is designed to celebrate Hi-tech most important movers and shakers; pioneers, Innovators, men, women, organisations and institutions who blazed the trail and used ICT to improve the way of life in our society.
It is the recognition of overall excellence, unflinching commitment and a lifetime of efforts in the service of ICT, humanity and Nigeria.
The Titans of Tech Africa Awards is the authoritative yardstick to measure performance in the West African ICT sector. It is also an avenue to influence policy, network and connect with key industry players.
He explains that while it is important to protect employees and their data without necessarily monitoring them, there is a need to monitor and protect the data of the consumer.
Today, the 28th of January is World Data Privacy Day. It is a day to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. It provides a perfect opportunity to focus on security best practices for protecting personal information and addressing compliance demands as governments and businesses obtain the personal data of users on a daily basis.
It has been 16 years since the first Data Protection Day was first held in 2007 to bring awareness to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. For this year’s celebration, I spoke with Hyther Nizam to understand the essence of how technology is helping to enhance workplace privacy. Hyther is the President, ofMEA at Zoho Corporation.
I asked if enough has been done to sufficiently bring attention to the subject of data privacy and Africa. He thinks that the rate of awareness among citizens differs from country to country often depending on the level of proactive policies in place.
“In some countries, there are very stringent privacy laws. As a result, the citizens and consumers are privacy conscious. And, in some of the developing countries, the definition of privacy ten years ago has changed drastically today but it may not be as advanced as we have it the developed economies. But, in all, I think that we are better off from where we started”, he explains.
With the rapid rise in digitisation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an accelerated rate of privacy laws adoption and implementation. So far, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, Uganda and Zimbabwe have implemented their versions of Data Protection Acts (DPA) to protect and secure the personal information of their citizens.
For instance, in Ghana, data protection is regulated under the Data Protection Act, 2012 (DPA) together with Article 18(2) of the 1992 Constitution. In 2019, Kenya passed Kenya’s Data Protection Act (DPA), which is the primary legislation governing the collection and processing of personal data in Kenya.
In Madagascar, the privacy of data is mainly governed by Law No 2014-038 dated January 9 2015, on personal data protection (Malagasy Data Protection Law). In September 2020, Mauritius signed and ratified the Amending Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Processing of Personal Data.
And, Nigeria issued the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation 2019 (NDPR) through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in January 2019. The following year, NITDA released the NDPR Implementation Framework (NDPRIF) to ensure the effective implementation and enforcement of the NDPR.
Yet, compared with what is possible, not a lot has been done in Africa. The continent’s model instrument on privacy and data protection, the African Union Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection has been signed by just 14 countries and only eight countries had ratified it by June 2020.
The African Union Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection is a crucial component of the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) agreement.
Hyther believes that in the absence of prevailing policy regulations, most of the responsibilities of keeping consumers of technology solutions safe become the prerogative of tech companies. He told me about Zoho’s commitment to keeping users safe.
“I recall that we rolled out of first privacy document at Zoho in 2006. We are committed to the fact that we are not going to own our customer date. We are not going to sell our customer data and we are not going to sell advertisement to our customers. So, when the privacy policies started to roll out years later, it was easy for Zoho to adapt to the policies.”
On Workplace Privacy and Zoho Solutions
Workplace privacy includes the various ways of accessing, controlling, and monitoring employees’ information in the work environment.
The increased dependence on the internet in the workplace has created concerns about safety for both employees and employers. Employers have also been known to have access to employees’ information to ensure compliance and avoid liabilities.
Technology enables employers to keep tabs on many aspects of employee workplace activity. The idea is to observe employees’ “digital footprints” and as a result gain insight into employee behaviour. Numerous kinds of monitoring are legal but some may brother on privacy incursion.
L-R: Ogundare Kehinde, Country Manager, Zoho Nigeria; President, Middle East and Africa, Hyther Nizam; Regional Director, MEA, Ali Shabdar at Zoholics Nigeria event in 2022
Hyther believes that Zoho’s policy on employee monitoring is perhaps the best to adopt. According to him, “if you want to get the best out of your employees, it is best not to monitor them”.
“That is a part of the Zoho culture. We give space to the employees. We allow them to work based on their convenience during the period of the COVID-19 lockdown when people worked from home. Of course, we installed top-notch security apps but it was not our objective to monitor the employees in their daily lives.”
Yet, he explains that while it is important to protect employees and their data without necessarily monitoring them, there is a need to monitor and protect the data of the consumers by putting in place measures that guide how they interact with work data.
“In our case, we had a software installed on all work gadgets- laptops, phone and tablets that prevented our employees from downloading and exporting any of our consumer’s data into their gadgets. Access to customer data was limited to some staff with some level of permission. So, we we able to ensure privacy without necessarily monitoring employees’ activities.”
GOING FORWARD!
As we celebrate another Data Privacy Day, it is important to reflect on what the notion of data protection entails and how that affects the lives of people.
Governments need to think about Data Privacy regulations beyond the notion of compliance to actually protect the data and privacy of citizens. It is important to start incentivizing the adoption of best practices for corporate players and end-users alike.
On the other end of the equation, organizations need to adopt security strategies that include regular risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities and threats. They need to adopt top-in-town innovative data encryption solutions to protect users against unauthorized access as well as make adequate incident response and data recovery plans.
The conversation Hyther has emphasised one important point. People matter and creating protection rules without breaching the individual’s privacy should be the hallmark of data privacy.
So, employee training on security best practices and threat identification as well as ongoing software and system updates to address known vulnerabilities and the latest security patches should be the priority for all.
Implementing these steps will help the government, organizations and individuals better to protect their data and ensure the freedom that all parties deserve.
Most entrepreneurs understand how important it is to constantly be innovating and building new products. But doing that the traditional way can be incredibly time and resource intensive. Even if you have the investment and funding needed for a team of developers, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get new applications out at the speed you need to remain competitive.
It also doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the best possible applications for your wants and needs. After all, with traditional app development, you’re relying only on developers to understand input from various teams within the organization and turn them into a viable product. If your business is still in its early phases and people are still getting used to working with each other, that’s not always a given.
With low-code platforms, employees are better equipped to execute their day-to-day tasks while also solving their own specialized difficulties and driving extra value from their current tool set without putting the organization or its security at risk. Fortunately, thanks to the rise of low-code platforms, this is increasingly feasible.
Understanding low code
Low-code platforms can be used by civilians and professional developers. Basic low-code platforms allow business users with little coding experience to build their own apps to suit their business needs. The potential benefits of this might be obvious but in case they aren’t, here’s a short breakdown of the benefits of using low-code platforms.
For the average startup developer team, it can eliminate a lot of heavy lifting. Since low-code platforms provide standard components such as forms, report templates, and ready-to-use code snippets, they immediately eliminate many of the repetitive tasks that make up the bulk of application development. The most progressive low-code development platforms have a full heap of capacities expected for making enterprise applications. Additionally, they can help eliminate errors, further taking time out of the development process. When utilized properly, they can help organizations build applications months faster than they would otherwise be able to.
Professional developers can also use low-code platforms that support developer-centric features, such as a full-fledged developer environment to hard code features to write functions that extend beyond low-code capabilities. Low-code platforms with additional capabilities allow users to build and scale complex business applications, too. This allows speedier delivery of custom solutions and better synergy between the business and the IT teams. With those benefits, it should hardly be surprising that, according to Statista, low-code development platforms will be worth US$65 billion by 2027.
Enabling and empowering
Knowing what the potential low-code platforms offer is one thing, but using them to enable and empower people across the organization to build applications is another thing. In order to get to the ideal position with low-code platforms, you should start with knowing what to look for in a low-code platform.
As well as the visual modelling and drag-and-drop interfaces which make low-code platforms easier to use, the platform should be secure. It should offer features to make your apps safer. No matter how appealing an app is, users are unlikely to embrace it if they feel unsafe using it. Having built-in security is even more important if sensitive data is involved at any step in the process. The last thing any business wants is to risk using a tool which potentially opens up a gateway to hackers.
Low-code platforms should additionally allow for multi-device deployment (meaning that an app only has to be created once for it to be accessible on any device) and facilitate scalability. More specifically, any applications created by an organization should allow it to add more users as the organization grows. This is especially critical for startup organizations, which have the chance to grow silo free and foster a habit of cross-organizational collaboration from the start.
It’s in this kind of environment that people feel free to experiment and try things, regardless of whether or not they have any development experience. Most low-code platforms provide end-to-end application lifecycle management as well, so application quality is never compromised.
Accelerating serendipity
For startups especially, quick turnarounds can only be a good thing. At the very least, it means the startup will achieve its goals quicker than it would otherwise have done. It might also accelerate the kind of serendipitous developments that allow startups to pivot and achieve bigger and better things than if they’d stayed on their original paths.
The history of startups is littered with these developments. Flickr and Slack, for example, both started out as internal tools for a massively multiplayer online game. If multiple people across the organization are building tools that have the potential to be useful internally, there’s a much better chance that one of them will be useful for other people too.
A trusted companion to traditional development
Ultimately, every organization should want its employees to be as empowered as possible. The best way to ensure that is to get it right from the start. Low-code platforms can be an incredibly powerful way of ensuring this is the case. While it will not replace traditional development, it can be a trusted companion; helping to reduce the load on professional developers and improving the efficiency of custom apps. As such, it can be a differentiator for businesses wanting to stand out in a competitive environment.
