An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Busi­ness­es in Trinidad and To­ba­go look­ing to mod­ernise their op­er­a­tions are be­ing urged to move faster in­to cloud tech­nol­o­gy, as Lib­er­ty Busi­ness and Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) deep­en their part­ner­ship to bring en­ter­prise-grade cloud ser­vices clos­er to the lo­cal mar­ket.

The mes­sage came from Si­mone Mar­tin-Sul­gan, vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of Flow T&T, dur­ing the of­fi­cial launch of Lib­er­ty Busi­ness and AWS Cloud Ser­vices at The Forge Culi­nary Stu­dio last week.
Mar­tin-Sul­gan de­scribed the col­lab­o­ra­tion as a ma­jor step in help­ing lo­cal com­pa­nies em­brace dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion at a time when or­gan­i­sa­tions are un­der pres­sure to be­come more ef­fi­cient, re­silient and com­pet­i­tive.

“This is an im­por­tant mile­stone in our jour­ney to help busi­ness­es in T&T ac­cel­er­ate their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion,” she said.
The part­ner­ship forms part of a wider strate­gic agree­ment be­tween Lib­er­ty Latin Amer­i­ca and AWS. Still, Mar­tin-Sul­gan said its im­pact will be felt di­rect­ly by busi­ness­es across T&T through Lib­er­ty Busi­ness, Flow’s en­ter­prise arm.

She said com­pa­nies are grap­pling with ag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, ris­ing cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty threats, grow­ing vol­umes of da­ta and the rapid emer­gence of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, while al­so hav­ing to com­ply with lo­cal reg­u­la­tions and da­ta res­i­den­cy re­quire­ments.
Mar­tin-Sul­gan said the new part­ner­ship is de­signed to re­move many of those bar­ri­ers.

By com­bin­ing AWS’s glob­al cloud in­fra­struc­ture with Lib­er­ty Busi­ness’ re­gion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty, lo­cal da­ta cen­tre ca­pa­bil­i­ties and on-the-ground tech­ni­cal sup­port, busi­ness­es will have ac­cess to end-to-end cloud ser­vices through a sin­gle provider.

She said cus­tomers will re­ceive sup­port through­out the en­tire cloud adop­tion process, from ini­tial as­sess­ments and strat­e­gy de­vel­op­ment to mi­gra­tion, im­ple­men­ta­tion, op­ti­mi­sa­tion and man­aged ser­vices.
For many or­gan­i­sa­tions, con­cerns over costs, tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise, busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity and ap­pli­ca­tion per­for­mance have slowed cloud adop­tion.

Mar­tin-Sul­gan said Lib­er­ty Busi­ness will pro­vide lo­cal com­mer­cial sup­port, sim­pli­fied billing and on­go­ing tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance, al­low­ing com­pa­nies to adopt cloud tech­nol­o­gy with greater con­fi­dence.

She said the of­fer­ing is ex­pect­ed to ben­e­fit sec­tors in­clud­ing gov­ern­ment, fi­nan­cial ser­vices, health­care, tourism, hos­pi­tal­i­ty, busi­ness process out­sourc­ing and oth­er in­dus­tries that de­pend on se­cure and re­li­able dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture.

Mar­tin-Sul­gan not­ed tech­nol­o­gy should be viewed as a dri­ver of growth rather than an ob­sta­cle.

“We be­lieve tech­nol­o­gy should not be a bar­ri­er to growth; it should be an en­abler of in­no­va­tion, com­pet­i­tive­ness and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment,” she said.

AWS is one of the world’s largest cloud com­put­ing providers, of­fer­ing on-de­mand com­put­ing pow­er, stor­age, data­bas­es, net­work­ing and soft­ware ser­vices through a pay-as-you-go mod­el.

Rather than in­vest­ing heav­i­ly in phys­i­cal servers and main­tain­ing their own IT in­fra­struc­ture, or­gan­i­sa­tions can ac­cess com­put­ing re­sources as need­ed and scale them up or down de­pend­ing on de­mand.

AWS sup­ports mil­lions of cus­tomers glob­al­ly, in­clud­ing busi­ness­es, gov­ern­ments and ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions. Its cloud plat­form al­so pro­vides tools for ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, an­a­lyt­ics, In­ter­net of Things ap­pli­ca­tions and dis­as­ter re­cov­ery.