accelerates, it’s crucial to remember that no one succeeds alone. Building a powerful partner ecosystem is paramount. Disruptive technologies move fast, but collaborative innovation moves much faster. What advice would you give to customers who are still wary of sending their on-premises data to the cloud? It’s true that some customers still feel their data is safer on-premises. However, I see a consistent and rapid change in customers’ perception, understanding that a softwareas-a-service (SaaS) system may offer even more cybersecurity resilience than legacy on-premises systems. Security depends on the physical and cyber protections you have in place – whether on-premises or in the cloud. On-premises systems face their own threats. As Marianna Dikaiakou, principal group software engineering manager at Microsoft, told me at this year’s AVEVA ENABLE EMEA: ‘Security is a process, not a product. It’s not something you buy once and forget. It requires continuous education, threat-modelling, patching, and working with responsible partners who prioritise security above all else.’ The decision to keep all your infrastructure and data on local servers versus using a SaaS system is like keeping your money under the mattress versus in a bank. And I believe we’ll reach a point where cloud security will be ubiquitous in the same way. Dikaiakou also mentioned the importance of investment and focus on cybersecurity education. I agree – we need to help people understand the measures we take to mitigate risk and that trust can only be built through transparency and consistency. How does the partnership between CONNECT and Microsoft showcase the value of interoperability? Our CONNECT ecosystem is built on Microsoft Azure, so we inherited scalability “AI must be applied to solve specific, contextual problems – not adopted for technology’s sake” 103
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