“The culture for business in Cyprus is gradually changing becoming more accepting to Private clouds and collocation options, and gradually to public clouds as well. This mentality has been changing in recent years, and nowadays we see banks having applications of non-critical nature in terms of data privacy on public clouds, and overall we see a movement towards that direction both at Macro levels and Micro levels of the economy. It is the future, it makes sense, it is easier, more convenient, safer, trouble free, and cost effective.” Kyriakos Kyriakou is General Manager Cyprus, and Director Government LoB Central East Europe at NCR Corporation.

We have our own data centre facilities, in different parts of the world one of which is Serbia. Through our data centre in Serbia we provide managed services to our customers.

“Our managed services portfolio of services includes monitoring services for the ATMs for our customers, helpdesk and contact centre services and a lot more. Other services we provide to our Customers that relate to data centres is consulting services, helping our customers to design initially their new data centres based on their needs, and we can also handhold the build or build it ourselves on behalf of the customer. Part of our service offerings is also our software, which nowadays we also provide as a service to our Customers. Software as a service means that you either buy the software and you run it in your own private cloud, or you buy the infrastructure service offerings from NCR as well outsourcing the entire thing to NCR.”

How to evaluate Cyprus as a tech centre, as the President of the Tech Association?

“Our geographic position creates a big opportunity, because on one hand Cyprus is offshore but yet nearby to manage. Perhaps not as a Primary site, but more as a Disaster Recovery site. As a product I believe it will be attractive to neighbouring countries to have disaster recovery sites in Cyprus.

“You know, many companies, wherever they are, are still a bit hesitant to place their data on public cloud, so they look into building their private clouds and colocation options. Cyprus can definitely play that role for the countries in the region not only from a data centre point of view, but also from a telecoms point of view. But in order to be able to play the role of a telecom hub, between Europe, Middle East, and Africa, you definitely need to have quite substantial infra structure for data centres you need to have both.

“We are seeing considerable interest from the Middle East. Cyprus has always been good friends with the Arab and the African worlds, and we’ve never been involved in any conflict politically. Cyprus is accepted in these Countries for business, and we need to take advantage of that. And from what I understand we are already doing something in this area, with the Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation, and Digital Policy having this as one of the major pillars of focus.”

To conclude on this I think Cyprus can play a significant role and become a major vendor of data centre services to neighbouring countries.

There will also be an opportunity for private investment, according to Kyriakou. Kyriakou notes that the culture for business in Cyprus is gradually changing, becoming more accepting to private clouds and collocation options, and gradually to public clouds as well. This mentality has been changing in recent years, and nowa- days we see banks having applications of non-critical nature in terms of data privacy on public clouds, and overall we see a movement towards that direction both at Macro levels and Micro levels of the economy. It is the future, it makes sense, it is easier, more convenient, safer, trouble free, and cost effective.”

But the investment in data centres is too large for them to become profitable while just servicing the Cyprus market, Kyriakou notes. “The local market is too small for these for any private investor to build a data centre, focus on the local market only, and be profitable. An investment of this kind will need a business plan to sell the services offshore as well, and while such goals are not easy to conquer, it is a must. So I don’t see this be- ing a game for the SMEs, it is a game to be played by the Big Corporations, the companies who can invest big and have the means to target offshore markets and be successful.”