#cloud-service-providers

#cloud-service-providers

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.

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.

The attacks forced a reckoning with one of the most consequential design flaws in global digital infrastructure: the concentration of military and civilian data on the same physical servers, in facilities that could become military targets the moment a conflict begins.

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."

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.