During my holiday on Curaçao I drove around the island and noticed the numerous small shops and companies at the side of the road. Even larger enterprises have representation on the island in the form of a single, small office building. Considering the market coverage in the Caribbean I concluded that we could service the complete business market, since it consists only of small companies.

I shared my findings with a couple of locals and for the larger part of the discussion they saw the great potential of the opportunity. Unfortunately one important factor for providing online services is completely insufficient. Apparently, the complete internet traffic of Curaçao is transferred to the rest of the world using 30 mbits of line capacity. This makes it almost impossible to backup large amounts of gigabytes. Therefore online backup services can only apply to small accounts, limited to just a few gigabytes.

Even with this limitation the market size can still be considered reasonable, since many companies are very small and have only a small data set to backup. However, IT and automation is not as much a significant part of these companies as it is in the US or Europe. I realized this when I checked in on my flight from Curaçao to Aruba. The local airline used a hand-written list to check off my name when I boarded.

Reviewing all this I concluded that the market for online backup in the Caribbean has its limitations. So far, the largest and most important industry of the island, tourist business, does not seem to be very dependent of its backups, since the sun will shine, no matter what will happen.