Dinner with Cloudian, VMware and Veeam

I was pleased to be asked to say a few words at a dinner last night with leaders of many of the UK’s leading Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and System Integrators (SIs), hosted by Cloudian, VMware and Veeam.

In thinking of what to say, I thought about covering one of three different topics;

1. I could earn my dinner and say what our hosts would perhaps not expect me to say, but certainly be pleased with. I think they are all great companies, have strong leadership & vision and I would happily advocate use of their products. The tight integration of Cloudian into VMware is just one important feature that sets them apart from their competition.

2. I could answer the proposed question – How can we collectively beat the Hyperscalers? But I’m not sure that is meaningful, unless there is a purpose and a shared rational in doing so. In a market that is growing rapidly, with a diverse and rich set of solutions that satisfy customer requirements, there is space for us all. Importantly without a shared purpose, we shall end up wanting to beat every company rather than work collectively. And the dinner will have no purpose or conversation as we all keep our cards close to our chest.

Or the topic I chose to speak about hopefully brings the dinner guests together as “like-minded people” or what I call community of interest. It starts with identifying a common purpose, set of values and objective.

a)     We all had an interest in tech – and from who was at the dinner an even more focused interest as MSPs, CSPs, Sis.

b)     Certainly, the discussion could be about storage as we all had a shared experience of Cloudian. The danger is the discussion mirrored a user group, which although something I support is not something I could add much value to.

c)     But what I suggested that we do all have in common would be “DATA”

3. Data is a national asset and needs to be treated as such. Today, 92% of data in the western world is hosted in the US and by the end of this year analysts predict that will be 44 Zetabytes of data. That’s is a huge amount of data and increasingly amount is hosted in the cloud.

And that data has value;

a)     It will deliver new insights, products, services, industries and wealth

b)     It will become a currency, as something with value, like oil or gold, it will be traded

c)     And therefore it needs treated as an asset and I would content due to its size and importance it is a national asset

But there is an issue if all of this data, this asset, is all stored in the hyperscalers;

a)     US CLOUD ACT – means that the security and sovereignty of our data can be shared with US Federal Authorities without our knowledge and could be used against our interests or values – be that personal, business or nation

b)     A Monopoly does not drive competition or innovation. And certainly not for the UK

c)     The UK will have no Digital Resilience or capability ourselves to protect this valuable national asset

It needs restating that I do not mean the all US tech companies are bad – we love Cloudian, VMware, Veeam, Cisco and the other great vendors that we all use. But as a nation we need to curate this technology into a service and capability that protects, enables and benefits, the UK.

That is why I think this community, needs to support each other, find a voice and above all ensure our data is stored in the UK. That is a first step in building a national capability.

(I have written more in-depth about this subject “A National Capability that treats our data as a National Asset”