Fifteen information and communication technology (ICT) professionals in St. Kitts and Nevis explored the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) through a two-day Developer and Network Management Technical Workshop at the National ICT Centre at no cost to the government of St. Kitts and Nevis.
The training, which was hosted in June by the Department of Technology in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, was geared toward strengthening competencies of developers to rapidly and safely deploy applications; and strengthening competencies of administrators in virtual private cloud, load balancing, DNS, security and cloud content delivery network management.
ICT Senior Policy Adviser, Pierre Bowrin, explained the reason for engaging participants in the training.
“The primary reason why we are doing this is mainly because of discussions that we have been having with regard to how we can be more resilient and how the public service could protect the government’s data,” he said, while referencing damages to other countries’ data in the region as a result of the 2017 Hurricane Season.
“So, in being realistic, in knowing that we are living in a hurricane belt, there are other technologies and avenues that we must look at to secure our data and to be more effective and efficient,” he added. “This is an opportunity for us to do just that – to ensure that if a storm comes by or something else that may pose a threat, that the government would have at least done all that it could to make sure that its information is secure and as protected as much as possible.”
Bowrin said that the training was timely as there is a great need for the federation to start using cloud services.
“The government of St. Kitts and Nevis always seeks to find ways in which we can be more effective, more efficient, and cloud services are something that we have been into for about a year and a half,” he said. “But we are taking this year to formalize it. This is really an opportunity for the government to advance its security resiliency going forward.”
The training was done by AWS officials Jesus Chavez, Solution’s architect, and Mario Velez, business development Edge team manager.
This is the second such workshop to be held in St. Kitts and Nevis in just a matter of months. In February, a similar training formed part of the celebrations for the reopening of the newly-renovated National ICT Centre.
Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments on a paid subscription basis. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
