Webinar: What It Takes to Build AI-Ready Telco Clouds
Shameless plug, Fierce Network hosted a webinar with Nokia, Everpure, and Red Hat. In this webinar, Nokia, Red Hat, and Everpure will share perspectives on the strategic considerations shaping next-generation telco cloud design—from standardization and lifecycle management to data readiness, operational efficiency, and support for distributed environments from core to edge. The session will explore how service providers can think about building a modern telco cloud foundation that is better prepared for automation, analytics, and long-term innovation. Check out the Webinar hereDenver Pure User Group (PUG) meetup
Details Our next Denver Pure User Group (PUG) meetup is all about protecting and securing all your data. Join us to connect, learn, and engage with your local IT peers around strategies to battle ransomware, speed up recovery, and prepare business continuity solutions for disaster recovery. Discuss a tiered resiliency architecture and strategies to implement before, during, and after a cyber incident. Topic : Cyber Resilience and 1touch Venue Prost Brewing Co. - Northglenn Biergarten 351 W 104th Ave Unit A Northglenn, CO, 80234 Speaker Scott Taylor Director, Cyber Resilience, Field Solutions Architect Everpure Doug Gregory Area Vice President, 1touch Everpure Register here!Pure User Group - July 2026
Hit the Links... Cincinnati PUG Style What’s up Cincinnati Pure Community? I hope you all are doing well, preparing for the approaching holiday weekend, and making those summer vacation plans. Speaking of, if you are making those summer vacation plans, make sure to avoid the week of June 29th. Why? We’re hosting our next Pure User Group meetup on Wednesday, July 1st, from 3-6pm at Oakley Greens. Join the community once again for an afternoon of conversation, and hit the links afterwards for some community fun! Call for Speakers With that said, we are looking for a speaker for the meetup. I know some don’t enjoy speaking in public. That’s completely understandable. I was one of those people for a long time. If you’re considering speaking, but are nervous, here are a couple of ideas that I can offer to help you. Bring a Friend - Whether it’s a colleague, a partner, or an application vendor; ask someone to present with you. This way you can split the topic in half, and you can help each other if one of you get “stuck” during the presentation. Just make sure the topic is how you and the partner / vendor together helped your business be successful. Upcoming Project - When asked to present, we immediately consider a project or task that we recently completed, that we want to share the success of the project with the community. Another speaking option would be to share an upcoming project or task, and ask the community their thoughts and feedback. Something along the lines, this is what we’re doing, we plan on doing this, but I’ve also considering that. Community, what do you think? Have you done something similar? If so, what worked well? What didn’t? Lean on Everpure - Have a topic in mind, but need help from a content or delivery perspective. A member of the Everpure team would be more than happy to help. We can help with content creation, or create a lab environment that would allow you to perform your own demo. Interested in speaking? Let charles_sheppar or your Everpure AE/SE know. Again, we are all happy to help. Attendance... It's Summer Y'all Make sure to click 'Attending' on the event page to let us know you’re coming. We know the days around the July 4th holiday are a popular choice for vacations, so if we determine that attendance might be a little “light”, we can reschedule for mid to late July. Topics To Be Determined, but we have some ideas. Let's get back to basics and talk about performance and capacity management? Too boring, how about a Fusion enablement session? Or, let's discuss how the community is managing the current supply chain crisis? Or, we can do a little bit of everything. Again, Everpure doesn't determine the topic, the community does. Date & Time Wednesday, July 1st, 3-6pm Location Oakley Greens, 3065 Vandercar Way, Cincinnati, OH 45209 https://oakleygreens.com/SOF Week 2026
SOF Week 2026 May 18-21 Tampa, Florida SOF Week brings the international Special Operations community together for one focused week of collaboration, learning, and capability development. Jointly supported by U.S. Special Operations Command and the Global SOF Foundation, the event serves as the central gathering point for SOF Operators, government leaders, and industry partners working to advance the mission. At its core, SOF Week is about connection and alignment. It provides a trusted environment where operational requirements, emerging technologies, and strategic priorities come together in one place. Through briefings, demonstrations, exhibits, and networking, the event accelerates conversations that directly impact capability development and mission success. The purpose of SOF Week is simple: strengthen the global SOF enterprise. By fostering collaboration across commands, agencies, allies, and industry, the event helps ensure the right capabilities reach the right operators at the right time. Click here for more details and to register!ACT-IAC Emerging Technology & Innovation Conference
May 14-15, 2026 | Hyatt Regency Crystal City DESCRIPTION: This conference will address the issues, challenges, and opportunities being faced by both the private and public sector with a focus on practical applications, enhancement and secure frameworks for cybersecurity defenses, strategies for designing and implementing AI-driven solutions, along with real-world examples of the latest trends, tools and best practices that will drive government innovation and improve citizen services. Click here for more details and to register!NLIT Summit '26
NLIT Summit '26 May 4-7, 2026 Kansas City, Missouri About NLIT The NLIT Summit is sponsored by the NLIT Society, a professional society founded to facilitate the exchange of best practices and ideas among IT and Cybersecurity professionals within the DOE complex, strengthen the infrastructure, and identify efficiencies within the DOE laboratory system. The Summit facilitates sharing information regarding all aspects of IT and Cybersecurity operations, technology, policies, and practices in support of research conducted at the Laboratories. It is open to all personnel in the IT and Cybersecurity fields working at Laboratories and Plants affiliated with government funded activities, as well as Federal government employees in the IT or Cybersecurity fields that work at agencies associated with the participating Laboratories. The Summit consists of presentations, Community of Interest Network (COIN) collaboration sessions, panel discussions, tutorials, and technology demonstrations on a variety of topics of current interest to the IT community within DOE. There is an emphasis on providing opportunities for active participation and networking between attendees. Best practices, strategies, methodologies, implementations, lessons learned, innovative solutions, and emerging topics within the DOE community are shared during the Summit’s many sessions and events. Click here for more details and to register!GEOINT Symposium 2026
The Nation’s Largest Gathering of GEOINT Professionals May 3 - 6, 2026 Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, Aurora, CO Join us at the GEOINT Symposium 2026, where we delve into the critical role of geospatial intelligence in building a secure future in Aurora, Colorado. Explore the intersection of technology and security as we address the challenges and opportunities in today’s complex geopolitical landscape. Engage with industry experts, government leaders, and innovators to discover how geospatial intelligence is shaping a safer world for tomorrow. Click here for more details and to register!When Data Becomes the Mission
Why state and local government, cities, and research universities are reorganizing infrastructure around data itself If you remember one thing from this article: infrastructure used to organize around applications. Increasingly, now it organizes around data. If you spend enough time around enterprise infrastructure, you start to notice something about how conversations begin. Someone asks about storage. Not in a philosophical way. In a practical way. How much capacity do we have left? What’s the refresh cycle? Is this staying on premises or moving to cloud? What’s the backup strategy? For years, that framing made perfect sense. Infrastructure was the foundation, and the job of infrastructure teams was to keep the lights on and the foundation solid. But lately, in conversations with customers across state and local government, municipalities, cities, and universities, something feels different. Because eventually someone says something like this: “We have this data… but we can’t actually use it.” And that is when the real conversation begins. Why the public sector reveals the truth about data There’s a perspective I heard recently that stuck with me. The public sector isn’t a niche market. It’s a microcosm of the entire enterprise technology world. At first that sounds counterintuitive. The stereotype is that government IT has been quietly living under a rock since the previous century, next to a beige server and a stack of COBOL manuals. But if you look closely, the opposite is true. State agencies, cities, and research institutions operate in environments that combine nearly every architectural challenge the private sector faces — all at once. Massive datasets Highly distributed users Strict security requirements Long retention policies Global collaboration And an absolute requirement that systems remain available when people need them most. In other words, the public sector experiences the full spectrum of data challenges simultaneously. If you want to stress-test a data architecture, put it inside government. Think about it. A state government may run thousands of systems across dozens of agencies, each serving different missions but increasingly sharing the same underlying data. A city manages infrastructure at the physical edge of society — traffic, water, SCADA, emergency services — where real-time decisions depend on accurate information. Universities generate some of the largest research datasets on earth while collaborating across institutions and countries. Each of these environments demands something slightly different from infrastructure. But they all demand the same thing from data: Security. Integrity. Mobility. Context. Availability. And when those requirements collide in one environment, something interesting happens. The solutions that work there tend to work everywhere. A laboratory for the modern data enterprise This is why many technology leaders quietly view the public sector as something more than a vertical market. It’s a laboratory for enterprise-scale data architecture. If a platform can operate in a world where: sensitive personal data must remain protected • systems span thousands of locations • regulatory oversight is constant • and uptime has real public consequences …then that architecture will almost certainly succeed in commercial environments. Banks, manufacturers, healthcare providers, and global enterprises face the same challenges. Just rarely all at once. Government simply compresses those problems into a single environment. Solve the data problem for government, and you solve it for the enterprise. That’s one reason the shift toward data-centric platforms is becoming so important. When organizations treat infrastructure as a place to store files, they solve only a small part of the problem. But when they treat data as the central operational asset — something that must be understood, governed, protected, and made usable across environments — the architecture begins to look very different. And the public sector, with all its complexity, becomes the place where those architectures are tested first. Which brings us back to the shift we’re seeing across the industry. Because once you start looking at infrastructure through the lens of data itself, something else becomes obvious. The center of gravity has moved. When multiple systems depend on the same dataset, the data becomes part of the operating foundation. And once that happens, moving it — or even restructuring it — becomes dramatically harder. Which brings us to the concept that explains a lot of what is happening right now. The quiet physics of data gravity The first time I heard the term “data gravity” wasn’t in a conference keynote or a vendor presentation. It was in 2015, when a recruiter from a startup called DataGravity (now Anomalo) reached out and asked if I would be interested in interviewing. At the time, the idea sounded fascinating — and slightly theoretical. The company was built around the premise that data itself was becoming the most valuable asset in the data center, and that infrastructure needed to understand the content, context, and behavior of data, not just store it. The name alone hinted at something deeper: the idea that as datasets grow, they start exerting a kind of gravitational pull on the systems around them. Back then, it felt like an interesting concept. Today it feels like a description of reality. The term “data gravity” itself was introduced by Dave McCrory back in 2010, and it turns out to be a remarkably accurate way to describe modern infrastructure. Dave McCrory Blog The idea is simple. As datasets grow, they become harder to move. More applications depend on them. More workflows connect to them. More policies govern them. Eventually, the architecture starts organizing around the data itself. Not because someone designed it that way. Because the physics of large systems leave you very little choice. Imagine trying to relocate a state Medicaid dataset that has been integrated with multiple benefit programs, identity verification systems, and fraud detection tools. Technically possible? Sure. Operationally trivial? Not even close. The larger and more interconnected the dataset becomes, the stronger its gravitational pull. Compute moves closer to the data. Applications move closer to the data. Infrastructure reorganizes around the data. This is why organizations that once talked primarily about storage capacity are now talking about data platforms. The center of gravity moved. When data stops being passive The moment data becomes operational, everything changes. For years, most organizations treated data as something that accumulated quietly inside systems. Applications produced it. Storage kept it safe. Backups made sure it could be restored. But that model starts to break down when the data itself becomes part of real-time decision making. You can see this most clearly in environments that generate enormous volumes of information. Cities now run infrastructure that continuously streams telemetry — traffic sensors, utility meters, environmental monitors, emergency response platforms. A water meter that once reported usage once a month might now generate thousands of readings per year. A traffic system that once relied on static timing can adapt dynamically to real-time conditions. Each improvement creates more data. More importantly, it creates operational dependence on that data. Universities experience the same phenomenon in a different form. Research environments produce extraordinary datasets across genomics, climate science, and artificial intelligence. Sequencing a single human genome generates roughly 100 gigabytes of raw data, and large research programs may create terabytes or petabytes of new information every week. In those environments the challenge isn’t just storing data. It’s feeding it fast enough to the systems that depend on it. Modern research clusters and GPU environments can process enormous volumes of information, but only if the underlying data pipeline keeps up. When storage cannot deliver data fast enough, expensive compute resources sit idle and discovery slows down. And that reveals an important truth about modern infrastructure. When systems depend on data in real time, the question stops being where the infrastructure lives. The question becomes whether the data is available, trustworthy, and recoverable. That distinction also explains why ransomware has become so disruptive to public institutions. Attackers understand that the real leverage is not the servers or the network. It’s the data. When access to data disappears, the services built on top of it disappear as well. Which brings us back to the deeper shift happening across the industry. If data has become this central to operations, services, and discovery, then managing it as a passive byproduct of infrastructure is no longer enough. Infrastructure alone is no longer the strategic layer. The strategic layer is the data itself. Organizations still need performance, availability, and resilience. Those fundamentals have not changed. What has changed is the expectation that infrastructure should also help organizations understand, govern, protect, and use their data more effectively. That is a very different problem than simply storing it. And it is the reason the conversation is evolving from storage management to data management platforms. The real punch line Public sector organizations didn’t set out to become data enterprises. Over time the data accumulated. Then the dependencies formed. And eventually everything started orbiting the datasets that mattered most. Data has gravity. Data has risk. Data has power. Infrastructure still matters. But increasingly, the real mission is something else entirely. The mission is the data. Appreciate you reading. Dmitry Gorbatov © 2025 Dmitry Gorbatov | #dmitrywashere
