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Channel Post MEA
27-05-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Core42 And Microsoft Unveil Whitepaper On Sovereign Public Clouds In AI Era
Microsoft and Core42, a G42 company specializing in sovereign cloud, AI infrastructure, and digital services, have released a comprehensive whitepaper titled ' Balancing Innovation and Compliance in the AI Era: Core42 Sovereign Public Cloud Leveraging Microsoft Azure '. This whitepaper delves into the transformative role of sovereign public cloud solutions in shaping the UAE's digital future, providing strategic insights and best practices for technology leaders to effectively adopt and deploy these solutions. Sovereign public clouds are crucial for several reasons: data sovereignty compliance ensures that data is stored, processed, and managed within a specific country or region, adhering to local laws and regulations, which is particularly crucial for sensitive information such as personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, and financial data. Sovereign clouds enhance security and privacy by implementing advanced measures like strict access controls and encryption, safeguarding data against unauthorized access, especially from foreign entities. They provide organizations greater operational control, enabling them to comply with legal and regulatory requirements while managing access to their data. Additionally, sovereign clouds support national interests by bolstering local digital infrastructure, fostering innovation, and reducing reliance on foreign providers. They also maintain scalability and cost efficiency, delivering the benefits of public cloud services while ensuring strict adherence to local regulations. A central insight from the whitepaper is that modern sovereign-enabled public clouds eliminate the long-standing trade-off between innovation and regulation. The paper features real-world use cases from the UAE, including AI-powered fraud detection in financial services, predictive diagnostics in healthcare, citizen data protection in government, and real-time analytics in energy. These examples illustrate how sovereign infrastructure can unlock transformative value while maintaining full regulatory alignment. By adopting a sovereign cloud model, companies in the UAE can embrace digital transformation with confidence, aligning technological progress with national priorities. The whitepaper also explores how the UAE is heavily investing in AI and the cloud to drive its digital future, with initiatives such as Abu Dhabi's strategy to become the world's first fully AI-native government by 2027. The UAE's sovereignty-first digital economy vision is being realized through such foundational infrastructure. By embedding data governance, compliance, and national security at the heart of digital transformation, the UAE is setting a global benchmark for AI-era leadership. The paper further highlights that global spending on sovereign cloud solutions is projectedto nearly double from $133 billion in 2024 to $259 billion by 2027, emphasizing the urgency for governments and industries globally to integrate digital sovereignty into their core technology strategies. Sherif Tawfik, Chief Partnership Officer – AI & Cloud for Sovereignty, Microsoft reiterated Microsoft's unwavering commitment to supporting the UAE's ambitious vision of becoming a global leader in digital transformation. 'The Core42 Sovereign Public Cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure, exemplifies our dedication to providing secure, compliant, and innovative cloud solutions that meet the unique needs of regulated industries in the UAE. By leveraging Microsoft Azure, we are providing a robust, secure, and compliant cloud infrastructure that empowers UAE organizations to harness the full potential of AI and cloud capabilities to innovate and accelerate their digital transformation journey while ensuring data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.' Adrian Hobbs, Chief Technology Officer, Core42, highlighted the significance of the partnership between Core42 and Microsoft as a testament to their shared commitment to driving digital innovation while ensuring compliance with local regulations. 'The Core42 Sovereign Public Cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure, which leverages our sovereign control platform, Insight, is designed to meet the unique needs of regulated industries. This initiative aims to enable businesses to achieve their digital ambitions securely and in compliance with regulatory requirements. Our collaboration with Microsoft ensures that we provide a cloud environment that fosters innovation while upholding the highest standards of data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. We are proud to contribute to the national journeys towards becoming global technology leaders.' The partnership between Microsoft and Core42 has been pivotal in driving digital innovation and transformation across the UAE. Recently, the Abu Dhabi Government announced a landmark agreement with Microsoft and Core42 to implement a sovereign cloud system that will enhance efficiency and boost innovation in government services. This multi-year agreement aims to create a unified, high-performance sovereign cloud computing environment capable of processing over 11 million daily digital interactions between Abu Dhabi Government entities, citizens, residents, and businesses. The collaboration is a testament to the shared commitment of Microsoft and Core42 to drive digital innovation while ensuring compliance with local regulations. The Core42 Sovereign Public Cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure, which leverages the Core42 sovereign controls platform 'Insight', exemplifies this dedication by providing secure, compliant, and innovative cloud solutions tailored to the unique needs of regulated industries in the UAE. 0 0
The Hindu
29-04-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Cisco intensifies focus on cyber security for AI Era
Cisco, a global technology provider, on Tuesday said it made several transformative innovations and partnership announcements that would help security professionals secure and harness the power of AI as part of the company's continuous drive towards reimagining security for the AI Era. Security teams have been inundated with thousands of threat alerts daily. An increasingly sophisticated threat landscape combined with an expanding talent shortage meant the need has never been greater for machine scale security and response, the company said. 'The cybersecurity threat landscape has never been more dynamic and complex, with adversaries constantly emboldened and enabled by AI to drive new attacks and exploits,' said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. To fight back, understaffed security operations and IT leaders needed AI power of their own. Cisco was continuing its mission to secure AI and leverage AI for security with novel open-source models and tools, new AI agents, and IoT advancements, alongside the full breadth of the Cisco Security Cloud, he said. ''Together, these innovations will help level the playing field and deliver AI innovation that makes all businesses more secure,'' Mr. Patel added. According to the company, Cisco XDR (extended detection and response) addresses this challenge by correlating telemetry across network, endpoint, cloud, email, and more, using agentic AI to surface what matters most to organizations. The new automated XDR Forensics capabilities offered deeper visibility into endpoint activity, increasing the accuracy of investigations while a new XDR Storyboard visualises complex attacks, empowering security teams to understand threats in seconds and decisively respond faster, claimed Cisco.
Forbes
10-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Do Mainframes Have A Role In The AI Era?
AI-Generated, AI-Enabled Mainframe Francis Sideco A couple of years after generative AI first entered mainstream consciousness, every industry segment is attempting to leverage it to improve efficiency and offer new products and services. While training will continue to evolve and drive innovation, inferencing will drive value creation through advanced AI capabilities such as chain of thought reasoning, multi-modal functionality and multi-model support combining different types of generative AI models with predictive AI. Most of the conversations on delivering these inferencing solutions gravitate around AI data centers, edge infrastructure, and/or on-device processing. This begs the question: Does the mainframe have a role in the AI Era? What Is A Mainframe? While servers are designed more for supporting general-purpose applications and multiple clients or functions like website hosting and email servers, mainframes are designed for high-volume, mission-critical tasks such as financial transaction processing and are often used in heavily regulated industries. As such, mainframes require a higher degree of capacity, reliability and security enabled with advanced virtualization, disaster recovery, backwards compatibility and built-in redundancy. Additionally, workloads are typically handled by a centralized mainframe system whereas a distributed architecture to spread workloads over many systems is commonly used in a server architecture. With the capacity, reliability and security that mainframes provide along with their ubiquity in supporting high-volume, high-value transactions and data processing, the answer to whether mainframes have a role in the AI Era is an unequivocal 'Yes!' IBM, the leader in mainframe solutions with 70% of all global financial transactions going through their mainframes, is a prime example. A Mainframe For The AI Era Telum II By The Numbers Francis Sideco IBM recently announced the latest in its Z family of mainframes, the Z17, with the goal of addressing the needs of the AI Era while still delivering on the rigorous expectations associated with mainframes. According to IBM, this Z17 generation is powered by its 5nm 5.5GHz Telum II CPU, which, compared to the previous generation, delivers an 11% increase in single-thread performance, up to 20% capacity expansion and up to 64 TB of memory, while also doing so with up to 27% power reduction. Additionally, Telum II has an enhanced on-board AI accelerator capable of predictive and some generative AI workloads. For the generative AI workloads that require more acceleration, the Z17 can also be upgraded with the new Spyre Accelerator PCIe card. Spyre Accelerator By The Numbers Francis Sideco Based on IBMs reported performance numbers, the Z17 provides 7.5x more AI throughput than the Z16 generation delivering up to 450 billion AI inferences with 1ms response times per day. What AI Workloads Need A Mainframe? Due to their heavy use in financial transactions and mission-critical data processing, mainframes are most effective when using a combination of predictive and generative AI models. For example, because of the high-volume, central processing, and multi-model capabilities, mainframes can effectively and efficiently analyze patterns from the transactions and data passing through the system and infer conclusions that can be used in advanced fraud detection and anti-money laundering applications for improved accuracy and fewer false positives. Mainframes also combine these capabilities with mission-critical business data to help enable business, code and operations assistants to increase productivity and reduce the time needed for skills training, and autonomous agentic AI applications like automated trading and healthcare applications. Other areas where AI-enabled mainframes are being used include, but are not limited tom loan risk mitigation, insurance claims fraud detection and prevention, payments fraud, geospatial analysis, climate change impact, loan risk mitigation, cybersecurity and sentiment analysis. These are just a small subset of applications where predictive, generative and even agentic AI leverage the mainframe for business outcomes that would otherwise be inefficient or not available because of the data and/or security requirements on standard server configurations especially in heavily regulated industries in which mainframes are typically deployed. The Future Of Mainframes In The AI Era According to IBM, there are already more than 250 client-identified AI use cases on the Z mainframe platform and growing. But it's not all about the hardware. IBM leverages its other AI assets like watsonx, Granite, InstructLab and even their consulting services, across IBMs solutions, including the Z platform, positioning the company as a strong partner for the age of enterprise AI. Competitors such as Dell, Fujitsu, and Unisys are also looking to leverage AI for mainframe workloads. Next generation mainframe development typically takes 5-7 years and if they're anything like IBM, it is safe to say that the next few generations of AI-enabled mainframes are already in the works. Not only are mainframes surviving in the AI Era, they are thriving.
