By: Staff Writer
November 19, 2021
A regional cloud service provider talks about the benefits of “sovereign clouds” and how it is a go-to next step for IT integration and development in the region.
Scott MacKenzie, Cloud Carib’s chief executive, told Caribbean Magazine Plus: “If you look around now to companies like VMware, or Cisco, or all these big fortune 500 companies, they’ve all shifted to this new terminology- Sovereign Cloud.”
He explained, “So sovereign cloud is the new buzzword for 2021/2022. And that’s really talking about nation states, maintaining jurisdictional rights to their data, right, which is important, because we all know data is the world of the future, it is the commodity that we all place a huge dollar value in.
“That’s why Google, Facebook, everybody focuses on data. So nation states, focusing on sovereign cloud gives them an advantage, a competitive advantage. And the beauty is in the Bahamas, the Bahamas already has a sovereign cloud. So it’s ahead of the game in the Caribbean.”
Sovereign clouds are architected and built to deliver security and data access that meets strict requirements of regulated industries and local jurisdiction laws on data privacy, access and control.
There are no other sovereign cloud centres in the Caribbean or Central America, but Mr MacKenzie said he is working to change that as he has engaged with several countries already on the idea of having their own sovereign cloud.
“To have a sovereign cloud you basically have to build out what is called software defined data centres and connected all together. Basically, you’re building Amazon inside your country, but it’s owned by the government. So the government knows that its citizen’s data is protected,” Mr Mackenzie added.
Cloud Carib has operations in Barbados, Bahamas, Jamaica, Ecuador and Guyana, primarily but they have done work all over the Caribbean. While The Bahamas is a little ahead of these countries with moving forward with a sovereign cloud the rest of the region “is not suffering” as a result.
Mr MacKenzie said: “I think the COVID is a horrible thing that’s happened. But I think it’s always these large scale events that force people to change.
“So I think we’re going to see tremendous transformational change globally, because of COVID-19. Even in North America, real estate companies are starting to become terrified because they realize about 30 percent of the workforce is never going back. So that means there’s going to be a massive amount of available office space, which is going to depreciate rental values. There’s a lot of a lot of transformation coming. It can be positive and I think that’s where we’ve got to all work together and leverage the opportunity, like the stuff with the Bahamian Sand Dollar, I think it’s amazing what they’re doing. And it’s those kinds of things that’s really helping The Bahamas to LeapFrog: It’s got a sovereign cloud, it’s got Sand Dollar at play, and it’s got all of the tools that really make the Bahamas, an exciting leader for the Caribbean region.”
The Sand Dollar is the Bahamian digital currency backed by the Central Bank of The Bahamas. It is not a cryptocurrency, however. It is just a digital representation of the Bahamian fiat/paper currency. The other Caribbean country that has a digital currency is the Eastern Caribbean block with their Central Bank’s “D-Cash.”