#custodian-switch

#custodian-switch

Western Union is six months into a migration of 900 to 1,200 applications that run across a 3,900-core server fleet. The decision to move came during a period of re-invention at Western Union, a 175-year-old company that is currently working to become more customer-focused and therefore is open to new suppliers to help reach that goal.

Automating Kubernetes workloads with Operators can provide the same level of functionality as DBaaS, while still avoiding lock-in to a specific provider.

When civilian banks, logistics platforms, and payment processors share physical data center infrastructure with military AI systems, those facilities become legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law - and the civilian services housed inside lose their legal protection.

S3 Files is built on Amazon EFS and automatically translates file system operations into S3 requests, allowing applications to work with S3 data without code changes.

Carrez calls this 'the survival problem,' and it forms part of his definition of sovereignty - digital, data, AI, and so on. He says, 'A lot of people are just talking about digital sovereignty as like a catchphrase for a bunch of things.'

Neocloud providers, which include the likes of Nscale, CoreWeave and Carbon3.ai, are having a somewhat disruptive impact on the market by making huge commitments to build out hyperscale datacentres in support of the UK government's AI growth agenda. These providers are also taking up capacity in colocation datacentres that some of the hyperscale cloud giants previously committed to renting space in, before pulling out.

Sovereignty, locality, and 'alternative cloud' strategies are often treated as simple settings in hyperscaler consoles. Pick a region, check a compliance box, and move on. IT consultancy Coinerella posted about replacing a typical US-centric startup baseline with a 'Made in the EU' stack. They treat sovereignty as an architectural posture and an operating model that can save money.

Too often, IT professionals feel like "order takers" for business groups - told what systems to implement or troubleshoot instead of being asked how technology can solve bigger business problems. Making the leap from support tech to strategic advisor takes time. The people who do it well don't just focus on fixing issues, they learn the business, talk in plain language, focus on results instead of tasks, and look ahead to prevent problems rather than just reacting to them.

Constructing datacenters accounts for 39 percent of their total carbon dioxide emissions, almost as much as operating them, according to an environmental analysis covering the entire lifecycle of a facility. The finding comes from a white paper published by European datacenter operator Data4, which conducted a lifecycle assessment (LCA) of one of its own facilities with the assistance of design and engineering consultants APL Data Center.

There is a growing emphasis on database compliance today due to the stricter enforcement of compliance rules and regulations to safeguard user privacy. For example, GDPR fines can reach £17.5 million or 4% of annual global turnover (the higher of the two applies). Besides the direct monetary implications, companies also need to prioritize compliance to protect their brand reputation and achieve growth.

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I watched something remarkable happen. Within two months, it hit 100 million users, a growth rate that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley. Today, it has over 800 million weekly active users. That launch sparked an explosion in AI development that has fundamentally changed how we build and operate the infrastructure powering our digital world.

Azure Governance is the set of policies, processes, and technical controls that ensure your Azure environment is secure, compliant, and well-managed. It provides a structured approach to organizing subscriptions, resources, and management groups, while defining standards for naming, tagging, security, and operational practices.

They slow down innovation, increase maintenance costs, and make it harder to scale or adapt to changing market demands. However, businesses choose to stay in this "toxic relationship" rather than break free of legacy constraints because the "breakup" is associated with risks, such as potential system downtime, data loss, disruption of fragile business logic, security vulnerabilities, and temporary drops in productivity - risks that can be significantly reduced with a preliminary software audit.

A North American manufacturer spent most of 2024 and early 2025 doing what many innovative enterprises did: aggressively standardizing on the public cloud by using data lakes, analytics, CI/CD, and even a good chunk of ERP integration. The board liked the narrative because it sounded like simplification, and simplification sounded like savings. Then generative AI arrived, not as a lab toy but as a mandate. "Put copilots everywhere," leadership said. "Start with maintenance, then procurement, then the call center, then engineering change orders."

A future-proof IT infrastructure is often positioned as a universal solution that can withstand any change. However, such a solution does not exist. Nevertheless, future-proofing is an important concept for IT leaders navigating continuous technological developments and security risks, all while ensuring that daily business operations continue. The challenge is finding a balance between reactive problem solving and proactive planning, because overlooking a change can cost your organization. So, how do you successfully prepare for the future without that one-size-fits-all solution?

Integrating databases into the CI/CD process or the DevOps pipeline is overlooked in the current DevOps landscape. Most organizations have adapted automated DevOps pipelines to handle application code, deployments, testing, and infrastructure configurations. However, database development and administration are left out of the DevOps process and handled separately. This can lead to unforeseen bugs, production issues, and delays in the software development life cycle.

This new reality is forcing organizations to undertake careful assessments before making platform decisions for AI. The days when IT leaders could simply sign off on wholesale cloud migrations, confident it was always the most strategic choice, are over. In the age of AI, the optimal approach is usually hybrid. Having openly championed this hybrid path even when it was unpopular, I welcome the growing acceptance of these ideas among decision-makers and industry analysts.

CloudBolt's survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1-24 percent of their environment off of VMware. Another 32 percent said that they have migrated 25-49 percent; 10 percent said that they've migrated 50-74 percent of workloads; and 2 percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they have not migrated from VMware at all.

An observability control plane isn't just a dashboard. It's the operational authority system. It defines alert rules, routing, ownership, escalation policy, and notification endpoints. When that layer is wrong, the impact is immediate. The wrong team gets paged. The right team never hears about the incident. Your service level indicators look clean while production burns.

The cloud revolution has transformed application development and deployment. Still, traditional network security, the castle and moat approach that served on-premises data centers, falls short in cloud native architectures where resources are distributed, ephemeral, and accessed from anywhere. Data exfiltration through insider threats, compromised credentials and misconfigured services has become critical for enterprises migrating to public cloud. Industry reports show data breaches involving cloud misconfiguration cost organizations an average of $4.45 million per incident.

Most businesses, which includes modern ones, invest heavily in technology, but they rarely plan for its eventual and inevitable exit strategy. Generally speaking, companies spend millions on the latest hardware while overlooking the critical phase when those assets reach their end. This lack of planning creates a massive gap in the operational lifecycle of many otherwise successful global organizations. Decisions made at the end of a device's life carry real business risks that can impact the bottom line financially and environmentally speaking.

The main advantage of going the Multi-Cloud way is that organizations can "put their eggs in different baskets" and be more versatile in their approach to how they do things. For example, they can mix it up and opt for a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution when it comes to the database, while going the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) route for their application endeavors.