During the past few weeks the devastation of Hurricane Irma and Maria has reminded us of the fragility of our built infrastructure. This was the assessment made by Dr. Stephen L. Boyce, Programme Manager (Education & Employment) Delegation of the European Union to Barbados, The Eastern Caribbean States, the OECS, and CARICOM/ CARIFORUM.
While speaking at the launch of the Community Online Platform, Systems –Tenth European Development Fund Projects at Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Complex , he said, “As our brothers and sisters across the region rebuild their lives and livelihood, attention must also be paid to building a more robust and resilient digital infrastructure.
At the regional and national levels, it will be vital to create technology recovery strategies as part of the business continuity planning process. Such strategies will allow for expedited recovery of networks, servers, hardware, data and connectivity. Data backup and recovery, server redundancy, and cybersecurity must also be factored into the equation. As such, if the systems in one impacted country go down, the business of the country can continue from a remote system on another member state.”
He believes, “We have been on this digital highway for far too long watching others pass us by. We have now come to a critical junction and must determine whether we come off at the next exit, make a few more loops at the roundabout, or shift into the future lane. In that lane, government, industry and academia collaborate in a single innovative space on a single cloud. In that lane our engines are powered by technology and fueled by knowledge …”
It is also critical that the systems have a certain degrees of intelligence, which allows them to learn from continual use. “Indeed, the success of any digital tool is the cultivation of a symbiotic relationship between the systems and its users. Smart systems become smarter when actively engaged by smart users who themselves become smarter. Platforms such as those being presented in the launch have little utility if not continually populated by current, relevant and reliable data and users capable of extracting the maximum usable intelligence from them ...These tools must therefore also be platforms for applied research both within regional universities and within research departments in the public and private sectors.”
Boyce stated, “In addition, we are of the view that a reliable integrated regional knowledge management framework remains part of the unfinished business of the first two decades of this century. Such a system helps to segment the harmonization and knowledge flow across digital platforms and the development of knowledge products and services for the advancement of the CSME…” Dr. Boyce noted. (NB)