The glorious visit of US President Donald Trump to the British Isles last week came with promises of thousands of precious GPUs, with Nscale, Microsoft, Google, and more teaming up to build a giant datacenter within walking distance of my house. But is the Tech Prosperity deal really a portal to a bright future or will it suck us in?
Given that corporate IT relies heavily on cloud-based infrastructure and services delivered via the public cloud, access to the data held in the cloud is paramount. Should all mission-critical data be held on-premise? What roles should digital sovereignty and digital residency play in a corporate IT strategy? These are among the questions being discussed at Forrester's forthcoming Technology & Innovation Summit in London.
During Gartner's event, Palmer posited that Broadcom's VMware doesn't view hyperscalers as strategic partners and vice versa. AWS took issue with Broadcom disallowing AWS and its channel partners to resell VMware Cloud on AWS, telling CRN in May 2024 that it was "disappointed" by the news. Still, hyperscalers, including AWS, have remained interested in doing business with VMware end users "because they know over time they will convert you to 'proper cloud,'" Palmer said.
In recent years, the global conversation around cloud computing has shifted from a focus on technology to geopolitics. Data sovereignty, privacy, and control are now top concerns for enterprises outside the United States-especially across Europe, the UK, Asia, and Africa. Regulations and shifting political winds are prompting companies to reassess the risks of storing their data in the hands of foreign-most notably, American-companies.
