Opinions by Daniel Thomas
I tried to predict 2025 from 2015, and 2026 has marked my paper
I wrote about 2025 back in 2015. A year past the line, here is what I got right, what I got wrong, and what it means for an AI strategy in 2026.
The UK Cloud Armageddon
The Miniaturisation of IT and Data Centres
HPE teams up with vArmour for application-aware micro-segmentation
Is Oracle a sleeping cloud giant?
Rise of the Millennial
Crouching OEM Tiger, Hidden Cloud Dragon
The China dream in terms of cloud and technology is for China to move beyond a manufacturing economy to one of technical greatness. China wants to become the designer, producer and retailer of these solutions, not just the manufacturer.
The technology landscape in the year 2025
The Great Cloud Juxtapose
A blog to Storage Marketers regarding IOT Scaremongering
Will the last reseller standing please turn off the lights?
Is your data locked in?
Daniel Thomas considers software defined networks and asks if your cloud services are locked in to your data centre?
Big Data and machine learning as a force for good
Daniel Thomas considers Big Data, machine learning and how our cloud computing expertise could benefit humanity.
A day with Arrow: Transforming the data centre
Daniel Thomas reviews Arrow's "Transforming the Data Centre," a launch event aimed at enabling MSPs to grow their business.
Articles by Daniel Thomas
Running Chinese Open-Weight AI Models Privately in a UK Organisation
Chinese labs now publish frontier-class model weights under MIT and Apache 2.0 licences, and a UK organisation can run them entirely on its own infrastructure. This piece separates the hosted-API route, which triggers restricted international transfers under UK GDPR, from self-hosting, which triggers none. It verifies each current model's licence at source, sets out the hardware tiers from a single workstation to an eight-GPU node, prices self-hosting against the official APIs, and reports the documented evidence on censorship, jailbreak resistance and code security from NIST, CrowdStrike and Booz Allen, alongside the absence of any UK guidance naming Chinese-origin models.
The Bank of England Now Oversees Your Cloud Provider
HM Treasury designated Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited and Oracle Corporation UK Limited as critical third parties, effective 13 July 2026 under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 regime. The Bank of England, PRA and FCA can now set requirements directly on the providers, including scenario testing, phased incident reporting to regulators and affected firms, self-assessments and skilled-person reviews. The piece explains the designation criteria, the obligations and their timeline, and the point the primary documents state plainly but commentary will miss, that regulated firms keep every outsourcing and operational resilience obligation they already had. It closes with practical steps for fintechs, insurers, payments firms and the MSPs serving them.
Choosing a UK Data Centre for Cloud Repatriation in 2026
The piece establishes that UK cloud repatriation is real but selective, with AWS itself telling the CMA that customers move back, and vendor surveys (disclosed as such) showing most organisations considering partial moves. It maps the UK colocation market from operators' own websites, showing London's 91 per cent grip on 1,803MW of live capacity against a thin regional layer, and explains why Ofgem's 125GW connection queue makes power the deciding constraint. It then sets out seven selection criteria with the exact questions to put to providers, weighs London against regional sites on latency, cost and staff access, and closes with a workload-led decision framework and a ten-point checklist.