On September 7th, 2022, the CTU signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with The Bahamas-based cloud and managed services provider, Cloud Carib. The MOU was entered into to strengthen “the collaboration between CCL, CTU, and Member States on sovereign cloud, data residency, data sovereignty, mission-critical services, and cybersecurity in support of Member States, and the CTU, in realizing a shared vision of a secure, interconnected single ICT space across the region’s Member States before 2030.”
Under the auspices of this MOU, as an initial practical step towards CTU Members developing a more self-reliant, self-sustaining single ICT space, the core mission-critical Network Time Protocol service is now being addressed. The implementation of a region-wide NTP service has, thus far, largely been neglected.
Network Time Protocol (“NTP”) is a core foundation service for ICT, like providing a network connection or electricity to power a server. The NTP service provides critical clock synchronization services to ICT components on both the public Internet and local area networks. It impacts network latency issues, cyber security functions, digital services etc. Indeed, anything in ICT that is time-dependent needs an NTP service to ensure the integrity of that environment. Since many activities are not restricted to internal networks but are conducted over the Internet, having a globally connected NTP service is critical. Before today’s announcement, there was only one NTP node available among CTU Member countries, namely The Cayman Islands.
Cloud Carib’s Director of Engineering, Sean Munroe, recently announced that Cloud Carib has expanded the regional NTP services footprint for CTU Members from the one public NTP node registered with NTP Pool Organization previously (ICT Community Open Sourced Public NTP services) to thirteen nodes. Twelve new NTP Servers have been made available to the CTU Member ICT Community as a public service by Cloud Carib. In The Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica, four new nodes have been provisioned in each country. More information on how to access and use local NPT services can be found by clicking on the link here.
Mr. Munroe also confirmed that Cloud Carib would be adding more NTP service nodes in each country where Cloud Carib provides services to ensure each client CTU Member State’s sovereignty and independence are guaranteed by not requiring extraterritorial NTP requests.
