- Air-gapped cloud solutions are gaining traction amidst security concerns
- Likely first adopters include verticals such as the military, medical and financial segments
- Though not connected to the internet, air-gapped clouds can still provide AI capabilities
What good is cloud infrastructure that’s not connected to the internet? It might just save you from an AI-fueled ransomware apocalypse — an increasingly common concern among enterprise CIOs. Hyperscalers are stepping up to fill the need for heightened security with air-gapped cloud solutions.
Cloud providers have been trying to push compute to the edge and on-premises for years, Leonard Lee , founder of the analyst firm neXt Curve, told Fierce. But CIOs are "freaking out" about security.
CIOs working in the military, financial, medical and industrial realms are particularly concerned, Lee said. In light of high-profile incidents such as SolarWinds, Snowflake and CrowdStrike, you can’t really blame them for worrying.
Their solution? Old school, Battlestar Galactica-style deployments, Lee said.
Readers of a certain age may get the reference. But for those who don’t know, Battlestar Galactica was a TV show in which the titular spacecraft was the only survivor of a robot apocalypse because – not in spite – of its outdated technology. The ship's computers weren't networked.
Modern CIOs want cloud capabilities, but they want the machines off-grid to help avoid the risks that come along with internet connectivity and hyperscale public cloud environments.
This trend has yet to fully take off, but Lee said he believes hyperscalers are seeing “emerging demand signals for this kind of thing.” While some verticals will be faster to adopt than others, Lee said that over time, more industries will turn to air-gapped solutions.
Hyperscalers have apparently seen the writing on the wall. Amazon has had its air-gapped Outpost and Snowball Edge products on the market for years now. Microsoft, meanwhile, offers an air-gapped version of Azure in the form of its Azure Government Top Secret cloud, which launched in 2021.
Google Cloud rolled out air-gapped infrastructure with the debut of Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Hosted last year and followed up last month with the debut of an air-gapped version of Google Distributed Cloud Edge.
AI in the equation
Asked what sets its new edge solution apart from the competition, Sachin Gupta, VP/GM of Infrastructure and Solutions Group at Google Cloud, pointed to GDC air-gapped Edge’s built-in AI capabilities and Nvidia GPUs. But integrated AI isn’t exclusive to Google Cloud — a few months back Microsoft announced air-gapped AI for its Azure Government Top Secret Cloud. AWS’ Snowball can also run AI and machine learning workloads.
If, like us, you wondered how the heck offline AI will be able to stay up to date given the technology’s rapid pace of advancement, fear not. Gupta said “Customers can get the latest version or updates from a secure repository and perform updates with the appliance without connecting to the internet.”
But keeping the AI up to date may be less of an issue than it seems. After all, as Lee noted, the models themselves aren’t huge — it’s the data that’s needed to train them that takes up so much space and bandwidth. For security, data enters and egresses the air-gapped cloud manually.
“It will be an interesting practice to see evolve,” Lee concluded.