Who Controls Your Compute?
Britain’s essential services, from energy and healthcare to defence, rely on computers they don’t fully control. If those computers stopped working tomorrow, how much of the country would keep running?
Join Orla for an evening on where Britain’s critical compute work runs, who controls it, and what happens when it stops…
Speakers:
🔶 Jascha Achterberg - Co-founder and CTO, Callosum
🔶 Farhat Raza, Deputy Director - Growth and Reindustrialisation, PM's AI Taskforce the Cabinet Office
🔶 Adie Holt, Founding Defence Lead, Cosine
🔶 Ross Exley - VP Defence Strategy, Hadean
On 20 October, a Google Cloud power failure disrupted banks, courts, NHS services and Royal Mail. In June, US export rules cut access to a leading AI model for nearly three weeks. Meanwhile, chip and memory prices have soared, with capacity booked until 2029.
All three expose how little control organisations have over the computing they rely on. Moving to a handful of cloud providers, most based abroad, has brought real benefits. But it also means an outage, a policy change or a supply shortage elsewhere can decide whether their own services keep running.
So what should change? Should organisations use British cloud providers, spread their work across several providers, or keep essential services running on computers they already own when the cloud fails? Each option costs money, and organisations need to decide which services they cannot afford to lose.
Our round-table will discuss:
If the cloud went down tomorrow, which essential services could keep running?
Does hosting data in Britain give us control over the systems we depend on?
What does “sovereign cloud” need to mean beyond a British postcode?
Who it’s for: Technology, operational resilience and security leaders in finance, energy, defence, government, critical infrastructure plus founders and investors working on the future of compute.
Other attendees currently include leaders from Google Cloud, Civo, Valarian, AISI, TBI, PA Innovation, UK MOD, ex-Palantir, and others.
The discussion will take place under the Chatham House Rule, followed by drinks.
Thursday 26 November. Arrivals from 6pm. Panel from 7pm.
Hosted by Orla in association with Antler.
🔶 Orla is building software to keep critical work running on organisations’ existing hardware when cloud services or connectivity fail. 🔶
LinkedIn: tryorla
Places are limited.