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Is Gaia-X on course to challenge the big tech platforms?

If anyone were in doubt of the impact that the misuse of data can have on businesses and nation states, they’d need to look no further than the recent investigations surrounding Team Jorge in Israel, the disinformation unit that allegedly worked to disrupt elections in countries worldwide.

Five years on, the Cambridge Analytica scandal is a reminder of how data is increasingly woven into the fabric of modern society and the dangers when it is weaponised.

While arguably it was Edward Snowden’s 2013 whistle-blowing of National Security Agency activities that triggered global discussions on data sovereignty, the Cambridge Analytica events accelerated it.

Just a year later, aware of the growing importance of cloud computing as the backbone of modern technology, governments in Germany and France came up with a cunning plan.

Today, that plan has evolved into what is called Gaia-X, an association of governments, technology firms, academics, public bodies and not-for-profits that is working to define a common way to solve Europe’s digital sovereignty conundrum. The need, according to Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X, is being driven by the fact that big tech platforms are controlling everything.

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The Times

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Cloud controls: why firms are rethinking how they store and manage data

When Uber announced in February that it was ditching its on-premises data centres and moving its business to the cloud with Oracle, IT professionals around the country would not have been in the least surprised.

Here was another example of an organisation admitting it’s not in the business of running data centres. As its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi put it, Uber is in the business of “revolutionising the way people and products move across continents and through cities”. Not forgetting that the deal with Oracle aims to “maximise innovation while reducing overall infrastructure costs” for Uber.

There it is in a nutshell. Cloud computing can help businesses slash costs while becoming amazing for the very reason they exist in the first place. If only it were that simple.

Uber’s shift from running its own data centres to moving to cloud services is significant. As Steen Dalgas, senior cloud economist at cloud infrastructure firm Nutanix suggests, data centres have become “increasingly expensive and complex to run”. Volatile energy costs and coping with the scale of generated data have made running data centres untenable, which is part of the reason the cloud seems so attractive.

But businesses must be careful. The image of cloud computing as a cheaper alternative is fair enough – to a point. Dalgas talks about the sticking plaster analogy and highlights how one of Nutanix’s customers started a cloud transformation three years ago, only to determine it was “too difficult and expensive to go to the public cloud”.

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The Times

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Between a cloud and a hard place: companies change applications tack

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a trend. While cloud adoption was already on the rise, quick decision-making and a change in working patterns is forcing new thinking on application management.

“We were humbled by the accelerated adoption of the Zoom platform around the globe in Q1,” said Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom during the company’s first quarter financials announcement in early June 2020.

With 169% growth in revenue compared with the first quarter of 2019, the video-conferencing firm saw its profit climb to £27m.

But Zoom hasn’t been the only beneficiary of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella recently revealed that the company’s Teams software now has 75 million daily active users, a jump of 70%.

While communication and collaboration apps have certainly seen a significant rise in popularity, cloud apps as a whole have taken a giant leap forward in terms of how organisations are now seeing the future.

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Computer Weekly

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