Yesterday I was on one of the panels of the Trinidad and Tobago Big Data Forum 2021. The BDF was run from the Trinidad and Tobago United Nation’s office. It comprised of a series of sessions over the course of two days. The session I was part of was titled “Azure: Platform of Intelligence & Digital Transformation”.

Herbert Lewy, from Microsoft Caribbean, delivered a scintillating keynote about the march of Big Data, the various parts of a journey that an enterprise can be on, and Azure as a destination for a variety of data needs.

There’s something Herbert said that struck me and my co-panelist, Dr. Maurice McNaughton. It was that with the cloud, anyone, almost anywhere in the world has access to the very same technology to build whatever you want. You can be in Silicon Valley or Petit Valley.

As someone living in Trinidad, in the Caribbean, equitable access to resources can feel like a dream. The time it takes to ship goods due to natural geography, along with the unnatural content-limitations imposed by broken economic models is part of a nightmarish reality. What if to access all of Azure’s features, you had to do so behind a VPN? One shudders to imagine.

But thankfully, it’s not a dream, anyone, anywhere can be a cloud developer. It’s something I’ve taken for granted from the very first forays Teleios made into the cloud way back when Azure was just a collection of worker and web roles. Cloud technology gives you access to the world’s computer. Now, with that access, and returning to the Forum, it begs the question, how do we get others to know this, and deliberately grab on to all it can mean for the rapid development and delivery of a range of services and technology?