AI surge spurs shift from cloud to local data control

The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) is swinging the pendulum away from cloud data storage, with organisations requiring more control over their data, not least to ensure others do not use it to train their models.

That is according to Cloudian CEO Michael Tso, who noted that the consequent attention to where data is located and how it is controlled has been a boon for the file and object storage company.

While there is a school of thought that access control should be the focus, there have been major data leaks that were made possible by cloud access controls not being used correctly or at all.

The public is more sympathetic to the “perceived care” shown by organisations when systems running on private infrastructure are breached, Tso suggested. Furthermore, “nothing beats physical security”, with all of Cloudian’s defence and secret agency customers having their own datacentres.

Still, Tso said the cloud remains a great ecosystem, and when it comes to data, a lot revolves around the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 storage service.

Cloudian provides full compatibility with S3 through application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing the use of well-known tools such as Apache Kafka and Snowflake with private data, so users get ease of use alongside sovereignty and control, he explained.

S3 has “won the war” for accessing data in various locations, Tso said, so “speaking that cloud language is super important” because most of Cloudian’s clients want to do certain things locally, while retaining the flexibility to keep more or less data in the cloud as circumstances dictate.

Cloudian has customers throughout Asia-Pacific, especially in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Indonesia, and in sectors such as financial services, retail, healthcare, government agencies, and telcos. What they have in common is a need for security and sovereignty, said Tso.

The company’s customers in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) include Rabobank Australia, the Australian Genome Research Facility, Würth Australia, Würth New Zealand, and Spark NZ. Cloudian also works with service providers AUCloud and CCL, said James Wright, its senior director for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

There is a role for service providers that understand business needs, according to Tso, especially as the big cloud providers don’t always provide good customer service. Service providers are generally in long-term relationships with their clients and can help them get what they need. And they can offer private infrastructure based on operating expenditure, so organisations are not faced with an upfront investment.

Another benefit is continuity: rather than relying on the technical skills of one or two of their own employees who might resign at any time, clients get ongoing support from the service provider’s team.

Wright observed that ANZ customers and their workloads are very similar to those in the rest of the world, with the common factor being large pools of protected, immutable and accessible unstructured data.

ANZ also accounts for an “unfair share” of the company’s revenue in the Asia-Pacific region, Wright said, largely due to the maturity of its IT sector.

Cloudian expects continued growth due to the ongoing interest in AI, machine learning and data lakes, he said, predicting a large uptake in connection with AI-related data in the next 12 months.

It is also working with hardware manufacturers, such as HP, Lenovo and Supermicro, as well as graphics chipmakers to improve the performance of AI models.

The company’s recent $23m capital raise will support its strategy of building secure and high-performance data infrastructure for countries and companies, Tso said.