We’re past the peak cloud hype of the 2010s and now well into the era of cloud maturity. But even as businesses have come to terms with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud models, new considerations have arisen, such as the growing push for cloud sovereignty and regional data center demand.
AI has put additional pressure on firms to figure out exactly what they’re running in the cloud – as agentic AI drives organizations to consider ‘always on’ workloads and whether this is feasible in a public cloud model.
How can leaders navigate this changing cloud landscape and what is on the horizon?
In this episode, Rory speaks to Alex Grimshaw, CTO at Microsoft Azure UK, to explore what he sees as the key trends for the cloud and how AI will shape it in the coming years.
Highlights
"So cloud maturity for me, certainly for my engagement, whether that's from C-level or IT leaders, we're very comfortable with IaaS. But now, what's our approach to becoming more pervasive or using more sophisticated services like AI? And how do we enable or garner an internal culture and kind of process where we can adopt these faster moving services like AI, microservices, etc, in this new, bold world? That's certainly when I'm seeing that shift happen."
"We made, in November 2023, a huge commitment to the UK government that we would make a huge investment in UK AI infrastructure particularly. And obviously, a skilling commitment is there because, of course, it's not only ideal just to have infrastructure in the UK but of course you want to be able to skill up people so they can actually utilize that infrastructure."
"The research of Microsoft, we released a paper that challenged, almost the idea that the copilot type technologies were almost dumbing down our ability to critically think about scenarios, because a lot of people may utilize a tool like that and just take for granted what the response is. It's not augmenting human thought, it's almost replacing human thought, which is clearly not the idea here."
Footnotes
- UK government inks five-year cloud and AI deal with Microsoft
- “A long time coming” - Microsoft data residency plans will see firm store all cloud customer data in the EU
- What is a sovereign cloud?
- Small language models are growing in popularity — but they have a “hidden fallacy” that enterprises must come to terms with
- “The tech guys want to move to the cloud, the finance people want the savings”: IT leaders feel ‘rushed’ to the cloud – here’s why slow and steady wins the race
- Microsoft says AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT are affecting critical thinking at work – staff using the technology encounter 'long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving'
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