President Trump effect on “Public” Clouds - a pivotal shift

[Ahmeddaoud]

In May 2019 President Trump; of the US, signed an executive order to add Huawei to the Entity List of US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, effectively banning them from doing business with any organization that operates in the United States. This was a pivotal moment for many individuals, states, and organizations about the volatile reliance on publicly available services like maps, mail, and search to name a few. Public Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) on the other hand, were also impacted by this ban as this decision introduced a political risk for the operations of Entities and sovereign corporates to operate in the public CSPs. The public cloud although brings multiple benefits however proved to be vulnerable to such a political risk. Although the public CSPs provide huge promises about operational efficiencies and automation, along with an attractive financial advantage and good return on investment model over on-prem solutions, the fact is that these public CSPs are now playing a much bigger role in the social and political life of the local communities which is beyond their own control.

Also, Data (as an asset) which is at the core of all Digital / Data Economies, although considered the most precious fuel for the data-driven future innovations fueling the business and economies alike, most countries have no comprehensive framework till date to determine ownership of data, which is not generally understood to be a property. The full economic value of the data can only be realized if the Entities turn data into useful insights, however this is affected greatly by Data sovereignty.

The result of the above; is what we are experiencing today in Europe in terms of the rise of national and community-based CSP initiatives (such as GAIA-X) to counter the public CSP fragile dominance. This initiative will not only address the above-introduced risk, but it will also address vendor lock-ins along with the economic value/benefits from having all the data in the public clouds. What we are witnessing today is a pivotal change into the “public” CSP dominance and a shift towards the hybrid, sovereign, and “Open Standards” –based” cloud services offerings that address these points.

But what does this mean to the local enterprises and governments in this part of the world? Basically; we will see more and more the rise of national and maybe Geo-Based CSPs that offer comparable or reduced levels of automation and operational efficiency to the public clouds that mitigate the public CSP risks and preserves the sovereignty of data. Similar to Food Security programs and initiatives carried by local governments, soon we will see a more structured effort towards building alliances and standards for “national”, Geo-Based CSPs, or Private CSP that preserves the sovereignty of data and offer less reliance on public CSPs, by ensuring that data is available and accessible across whatever cloud and whatever system it resides on, hence the push for open systems and open standards.

What the future holds is really a combination of hybrid infrastructure capabilities that are AI-enabled and driven by simplified Automation that enables the future CSPs to be as good as the public CSP in a short period of time. Along with this premise, we will also see more sovereign efforts from counties and clusters of counties to deviate from public cloud reliance and adopt the localized versions of CSPs that are fully controlled and managed by the local entities, adopting open standards for Data and workloads.

The above will only be possible through the employment of intelligent infrastructure solutions with AI capabilities and extensions that form the basis for future CSPs. At HPE, and as part of our overall strategy, we have the right solutions and tools that will enable such implementations to start today. Our flagship Greenlake consumption model covers our intelligent infrastructure along with our Data fabric and AI capabilities that brings the public cloud experience right to the doorstep of the entity / community is only the beginning of a new era. Although this model is still evolving and granted that it will evolve further to include additional ecosystems partners, vendors, and providers to allow us to help communities, governments and CSPs define the future through open-standards and sovereign Clouds platforms. 

Ahmed Dauod
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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