Amid recovery, U.S. Virgin Islands looks to cloud and consolidation

For U.S. Virgin Islands CIO Angelo Riddick, consolidation of the territory’s information technology operation will lead to better resiliency and reliability during the next natural disaster.

“We’re still working from under the storms of Irma and Maria in 2017,” Riddick says in a video interview. “I want to look at consolidating our enterprise as well as putting some technologies in place for our emergency services.”

Those technologies run the gamut from applications and tools to a cloud-supported IT infrastructure, Riddick says.

“What we learned post-recovery from the hurricanes was that we can’t rely on local systems to provide the support after we’ve been downed by a hurricane or a significant event,” Riddick says. “Connectivity for the Virgin Islands is crucial, because when the lights are out, the lights are out.”

Riddick says the territory is looking toward a hybrid solution for secure data and operations — one that relies on both local and cloud systems for reliability and security.

By leaning on cloud services, Riddick says the U.S. Virgin Islands can focus on restoring connectivity in the event of a disaster, rather than recovering destroyed systems and hardware.

“I would bet that we can get our connectivity a lot faster than we can recover broken systems locally,” Riddick says.

Riddick on the workforce:

Riddick on the future of tech in the U.S. Virgin Islands:

These videos were produced by StateScoop at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ midyear conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in May 2019.