Air-gapped clouds fill a strange niche. Here’s what you need to know

• Cloud solutions without cloud storage are gaining popularity due to security concerns
• Likely early adopters include sectors such as the military, medical and financial sectors.
• Even though they are not connected to the internet, air-gapped clouds can still offer AI capabilities

What good is cloud infrastructure if it’s not connected to the internet? It could save you from an AI-driven ransomware apocalypse — an increasing concern among enterprise CIOs. Hyperscalers are stepping in to meet 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 analyst firm neXt Curve, told Fierce. But CIOs are “freaking out” about security.

CIOs working in the military, financial, medical and industrial sectors are particularly concerned, Lee said. Given high-profile incidents like SolarWinds, Snowflake and CrowdStrike, you can’t really blame them for being concerned.

Their solution? Old school, Battlestar Galactica-style implementations, 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a TV show in which the eponymous spaceship was the sole survivor of a robot apocalypse because – not in spite of – the outdated technology. The ship’s computers were not networked.

Modern CIOs want cloud capabilities, but they want the machines to be off-grid to avoid the risks that come with internet connectivity and large-scale public cloud environments.

The trend hasn’t fully taken off yet, but Lee said he believes hyperscalers are seeing “emerging demand signals for this kind of thing.” While some verticals will adopt faster than others, Lee said more industries will turn to air-gapped solutions over time.

Hyperscalers have apparently already seen it. Amazon has had its air-gapped Outpost and Snowball Edge products on the market for years. 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 an air-gapped infrastructure last year with the introduction of Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Hosted, followed by the introduction last month of an air-gapped version of Google Distributed Cloud Edge.

AI in the equation

When asked what sets his new edge solution apart from the competition, Sachin Gupta, VP/GM of Infrastructure and Solutions Group at Google Cloud, pointed to the built-in AI capabilities of GDC air-gapped Edge and Nvidia GPUs. But built-in AI isn’t exclusive to Google Cloud: a few months ago, 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 were wondering how offline AI would stay up to date given the rapid pace of technology advancement, fear not. Gupta said, “Customers will be able to pull the latest version or updates from a secure repository and perform updates using the device without connecting to the internet.”

But keeping the AI ​​up to date may be less of a problem than it seems. After all, as Lee noted, the models themselves aren’t huge — it’s the data needed to train them that takes up so much space and bandwidth. For security, data is manually flowed in and out of the air-gapped cloud.

“It will be an interesting practice to watch evolve,” Lee concluded.