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.
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.
Developers have spent the past decade trying to forget databases exist. Not literally, of course. We still store petabytes. But for the average developer, the database became an implementation detail; an essential but staid utility layer we worked hard not to think about. We abstracted it behind object-relational mappers (ORM). We wrapped it in APIs. We stuffed semi-structured objects into columns and told ourselves it was flexible.
A table is a collection of items, and an item is a collection of namedattributes. Items are uniquely identified by apartition key attribute and an optionalsort key attribute. The partition key determines where (i.e. on what computer) an item is stored. The sort key is used to get ordered ranges of items from a specific partition. That's is, that's the whole data model. Sure, there's indexes and transactions and other features, but at its core, this is it. Put another way:
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."
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.
Manual database deployment means longer release times. Database specialists have to spend several working days prior to release writing and testing scripts which in itself leads to prolonged deployment cycles and less time for testing. As a result, applications are not released on time and customers are not receiving the latest updates and bug fixes. Manual work inevitably results in errors, which cause problems and bottlenecks.
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?
In 2024, Oracle launched its Database 23ai, dropping the "c" suffix it established for cloud in 2013. But the release never arrived as a general on-premises option beyond Oracle's own engineered systems, and the company later pushed back the Premier Support cutoff for 19c to December 31, 2029, with Extended Support running through December 31, 2032. Premier support was originally slated to end in 2024.
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.