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Articles and posts from Adrian Hollister across the blog, LinkedIn and Bluesky — on digital sovereignty, cyber security, data protection, and breaking free from US tech dependence.
Bodmin based WebMate is the world's highest-ranked web hosting provider! WebMate has just been placed first among more than 30,000 hosting companies worldwide by HostList.io, the independent hosting directory. Gary Hall started building internet services from the town in 1996, when most of Cornwall…
View on LinkedIn →Airbus moved its ERP to a French cloud and left its AI platform on AWS. Now Microsoft is selling "sovereign AI" with Europe's one frontier lab inside its tent. The cloud dependency took 15 years to harden. The AI layer is hardening faster, and the defaults are being set now.
View on Bluesky →Sovereignty, Sold Separately
The infrastructure argument for digital sovereignty is over. The next front is the AI layer, and it is hardening faster than the cloud ever did. When the vendor that could not guarantee French data to the French Senate becomes the loudest seller of sovereignty, buying the label is not progress. It…
Read article →Somewhere in your organisation this quarter, someone is choosing the default AI stack for a workflow. Nobody in the room is calling it a sovereignty decision. In five years it will turn out to have been one. That is the argument of my new piece, and it started in the comments under the Airbus post…
View on LinkedIn →The last interface is your own voice. Why should anyone need to understand the back-end systems ever again? Not the finance ledger's logic, not the CRM's data model, not which portal, which code, which mandatory field. Why is any of that still part of anyone's job who is not running those systems?…
View on LinkedIn →Airbus Just Pulled Its Crown Jewels Out of the American Cloud
Europe largest industrial company is migrating its most critical systems off AWS and onto a French provider, explicitly to keep them beyond the reach of foreign extraterritorial law. Read the detail and a playbook appears: classify by consequence, procure on jurisdiction, keep your options, move…
Read article →The cyber heads of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, including our National Cyber Security Centre warn that traditional approaches to managing cyber risk are no longer enough as cyber capabilities are evolving faster than many organisations are prepared for. Read the full statement.
View on LinkedIn →For years, the killer argument against digital sovereignty was simple: nobody serious actually moves. Too hard. Too expensive. Too risky. Last week Airbus did the impossible - it moved from AWS and American law into EU servers. The systems that design, build and sell its aircraft, the ERP, the…
View on LinkedIn →The European Space Agency's INVICTUS programme, led by the UK's Frazer-Nash, aims to fly a fully reusable, hydrogen-fuelled test aircraft at Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, by early 2031. It is the kind of programme that anchors an aerospace ecosystem for a generation: the technologies…
View on LinkedIn →The best AI users in any organisation were good at something else first: delegation. Watch someone get consistently strong results from these tools and you are not watching a technical skill. You are watching a management skill. They give a clear brief. They provide context the other party could…
View on LinkedIn →Cornwall is building its digital future. With £36 million awarded to Wildanet for rural connectivity and Openreach expanding full fibre to 25 million premises by year end, we are seeing substantial investment in regional infrastructure. This matters beyond faster downloads. Reliable connectivity…
View on LinkedIn →Every AI policy leans on one sentence: a human reviews the output. In practice that mostly means a person clicking approve on work produced faster than they could check it. Watch one number: how often reviewers disagree with the machine. A rate of never means the control has quietly died.
View on Bluesky →The Approve Button Is Doing a Lot of Work
Every AI policy now leans on one sentence: a human reviews the output. In practice that often means a person glances at something plausible and clicks approve. That is ceremony, not review. Real review has to be designed, and the methods auditors have trusted for a century transfer directly.
Read article →A new venture builder in Penryn is taking on climate tech’s hardest problem: the gap between the lab and the factory. Redox Foundry hands green hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture startups world-class labs from day one. Quietly, Cornwall keeps building the tools the future runs on.
View on Bluesky →Full support for this, and credit to Toby and the Chamber for pushing it. Five hours to London without reliable connectivity is a productivity tax Cornwall should not be paying, and the DfT response is encouraging. One thing is worth designing in at procurement rather than discovering afterwards…
View on LinkedIn →More than 1,500 people came to Spaceport Cornwall this month for the TECgirls Reach for the Sky festival, its biggest yet. Girls from across Cornwall meeting rockets, robots and the people who build them, an hour from home. The next generation of Cornish engineers won’t need to leave to begin.
View on Bluesky →We became, without ever agreeing to it, the integration layer between our own tools. Count the systems you touched at work this week. The HR portal. The finance system. The timesheet tool. The CRM. The expenses app. The ticketing system. Each with its own login, its own logic, its own idea of how…
View on LinkedIn →A year ago Microsoft told the French Senate it couldn’t guarantee French public data would stay out of US hands. Not a scandal, just the CLOUD Act working as written. Last month Brussels answered with a four-tier sovereignty framework. Residency is geography. Sovereignty is jurisdiction.
View on Bluesky →Residency Is Not Sovereignty
A Microsoft executive told the French Senate it could not guarantee French public data would stay beyond American reach. That one answer collapsed a comfortable assumption held across Europe and Britain: that data residing in Europe is governed by Europe. Residency is geography. Sovereignty is…
Read article →Data residency is not sovereignty. Your data can sit in a European data centre and still answer to Washington, because the company running the building does. US providers hold over 70% of the EU cloud market. Where the server sits matters less than who the operator answers to.
View on Bluesky →Quiet failure mode in AI-first: when humans stop handling the routine, they lose the fluency that made them good at the exceptions. The reviewer who only ever sees the strange cases is making the hardest calls with the least practice. Automate the work, but design hard for the humans who remain.
View on Bluesky →AI-First: The End of the Form, and the Beginning of a Much Harder Question
AI-first inverts the old bargain: instead of the human adapting to the system, the system adapts to the human. The vision is compelling, but four hard questions sit inside it, and organisations that adopt the vision without answering them will get the failure modes rather than the prize.
Read article →The AI-first pitch is that routine approvals run automatically and only exceptions reach a human. But the rules are now code and prompts, written by whoever runs the AI layer. One person who can change a rule, deploy it and edit the logs has power no one in a manual process ever had.
View on Bluesky →Think about how much of your week is spent translating. Not doing the work. Explaining the work to the systems afterwards: the timesheet, the project record, the CRM update, the bid template. For decades we answered this with better forms. The human still adapted to the system. AI-first inverts it…
View on LinkedIn →We talk a lot about digital sovereignty. The oldest version is simpler: a people keeping their own language. Cornwall's ten-year plan for Kernewek lands this summer, the aim being a living everyday tongue, not a museum piece. A language survives now partly by existing online. Meur ras, Kernow.
View on Bluesky →Did you know Cornwall has rainforest? Temperate, Atlantic, mossy and rare, and rarer than tropical rainforest worldwide. Near Muchlarnick the first trees are now in the ground on a 50-year project to bring it back. People planting woods they will never see full-grown!
View on Bluesky →Same Cornish dishes that beamed the Apollo 11 landing to the world in 1969 helped track NASA's Artemis II crew round the Moon this year, the first people beyond Earth orbit since 1972. Goonhilly, on the Lizard, is now one of only a handful of commercial deep space stations on the planet.
View on Bluesky →Linux-first isn't a feature. It's a philosophy that starts in firmware. Every device, every power state, every optimisation is designed to work with Linux from day one. The best Linux experience is the one you never have to think about. Built for Linux from the firmware up.
View on LinkedIn →I changed my mind about something while writing this. I'd been treating Cornwall's cables, wind farms, lithium and new data centre as four good-news stories. They're not four stories. They're one. And the Goonhilly takeover, announced the same month its data centre opened, is what made the single…
View on LinkedIn →Cornwall is becoming one of Europe's answers to a hard problem. We hold Europe's largest lithium deposit, and projects there are now producing battery-grade lithium from granite. While one China refines most of the world's supply, Europe is starting to make its own. Sovereignty begins underfoot.
View on Bluesky →Cornwall: The County at the Centre of the Map?
Cornwall is usually described as the far end of the line. But map the physical infrastructure a modern country actually runs on, the cables, the energy, the minerals, the compute, and the county sits unusually close to the centre. Having that infrastructure on your soil is not the same as…
Read article →Cornwall just topped the UK for solar generation, ahead of Wiltshire and Somerset. A solar boom is also 1.6 million internet-connected inverters at the grid edge, mostly foreign-made, rarely patched. Clean energy is a cyber resilience question now, not just a generation one.
View on Bluesky →European digital sovereignty keeps getting framed as a regulatory project. I think that’s half the picture. The other half is physical: cables, landing stations, energy, the hardware under everything. You can’t govern what you don’t control at the layer below the law.
View on Bluesky →New here. I work in cyber security and data protection, and write about digital sovereignty: who controls our data, whose law governs it, and the physical infrastructure most people never think about. Cornwall-based, which sits closer to the centre of that map than you'd expect. Building AltLibre.
View on Bluesky →I keep seeing teams use AI to build genuinely useful things. A script that reconciles two systems nobody wanted to integrate. A tool that turns a four-hour reporting job into a button. Then I ask the obvious questions. Who owns it? Where is it documented? What happens if the person who built it…
View on LinkedIn →France's national passport and ID agency has been breached. 11.7 million records: names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers. Passports, driving licences, residence permits. Up on a criminal forum for sale within three days of the attack. French police arrested the suspect on April 25. He is…
View on LinkedIn →AI Governance Is Where It Is At
AI governance is not a compliance question, it is a strategic one. The most boring document in the building is the one that decides whether the promised productivity gift lands in better work, better thinking, or an earlier finish.
Read article →Two AIs, One Suite, One Switch: The Microsoft-Anthropic Bundle Reaches Europe
Microsoft has put both the Claude and GPT models into the same Microsoft 365 Copilot tenant. For European customers that means engaging two US AI providers through one US cloud vendor, with the Claude integration sitting outside the EU Data Boundary.
Read article →AI in 2026: An Awareness Briefing for Executive Teams
AI vendor adoption is happening faster than the strategies written to handle it. The questions that matter at executive level are not which vendor, but data classification, jurisdiction, governance, and how to manage a landscape that changes faster than annual planning cycles.
Read article →The AI Engine Choice Is Not the Hardest Bit: A Practitioner Perspective on AI Adoption
Every IT leadership team is arguing about which AI engine to use. It is the wrong argument. The engine is a small part of the picture; the hard parts are data classification, oversharing, jurisdiction, and governance.
Read article →The Audit You Are Dreading Is The One You Need
You cannot audit yourself, for the same reason a barrister cannot sit on the jury for their own case. A good auditor walks in cold, asks you to show rather than tell, and the gap between what you believe is true and what you can evidence is the most useful gap in IT.
Read article →MFA at the door. Conditional access on every app. EDR on every endpoint. And then your developer pastes customer data into ChatGPT/Claude/other to ask why a query runs slowly. Every control fired correctly. The data still left the building and who knows who has it now. The control surface for data…
View on LinkedIn →What is the Point of InfoSec if the Data Walks Out Through the AI Prompt Box?
We spent a decade hardening identity, then a developer pastes a stored procedure full of customer emails into ChatGPT. Every control fired correctly, and the data still left the building. The boundary that matters is no longer the firewall; it is the prompt box.
Read article →Watching Google wind down Nest feels oddly familiar. Sixteen years at IBM will do that to you. $3.2bn for Nest in 2014. Founders gone by 2018. Products quietly put down one by one, Dropcam, Nest Secure, Nest Protect, Nest x Yale, Nest Cam IQ. The Nest app folded into Google Home. Brand fading. IBM…
View on LinkedIn →Triage is not a process. It is pattern matching across competing streams of bad data while the ground keeps moving. The ticket you opened thirty seconds ago is no longer the same ticket. It has shifted under multiple external factors while you were reading it. Linear, sequential processing falls…
View on LinkedIn →Every time you type a URL, your device quietly asks a DNS resolver to translate it into an IP address. Most people's queries go straight to Google or Cloudflare without a second thought. Both are American companies, both subject to the CLOUD Act and FISA 702, and neither has ever really had a…
View on LinkedIn →So You Think IT Just Installs Apps
Fixing your laptop is about 3% of what IT does. The other 97% is a sprawling, invisible operation that keeps your entire digital existence from collapsing into a smoking heap, and which receives the recognition typically afforded to the office air conditioning.
Read article →Ten Jurisdictions, One Principle: Personal Data on Work Devices Is Not a Corporate Asset
A quick personal search, a family message from a corporate email, or a health appointment booked on a company laptop does not make that data the property of your employer. Across ten very different legal systems, the same principle recurs: privacy does not stop at the office door.
Read article →The European Commission was breached on Tuesday. Hackers walked into its Amazon Web Services account and claimed 350 GB of data. The investigation is ongoing. But the hack is not what frightens me. It is what was already there before the hackers arrived. Under the US CLOUD Act, American authorities…
View on LinkedIn →I Ditched Windows for a Sheffield-Built Linux Laptop. Here is What Actually Happened.
Every laptop in your office is probably running Windows or macOS, with every byte under US legal jurisdiction. I bought a Star Labs Horizon with Zorin OS to find out if Linux can replace it all.
Read article →In today's small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), IT is much more than a set of disconnected tools. It's a dynamic ecosystem where every part is linked. A single software update can disrupt entire teams, a last-minute client request can destabilise critical platforms, and unpredictable budgets…
View on LinkedIn →The Domino Principle: Understanding Interconnectedness in SMB IT for Stable Growth
In the SMB world, everything is connected. A single, apparently small alteration in one corner of the network can send shocks through the entire organisation.
Read article →The decision between building bespoke software and buying off-the-shelf solutions is more complex than ever. Organisations face rapid technological change, new operational risks, and growing data sovereignty demands. Generative AI lowers the cost of custom development but brings new governance…
View on LinkedIn →The Software TCO Paradox: COTS, Bespoke, Vibe Code
The traditional build-vs-buy heuristic is no longer sufficient. This white paper re-examines Total Cost of Ownership through the lens of immediate change, data sovereignty, and AI-generated code.
Read article →The Algorithm and the Aid Worker: A Guide to Responsible AI in Humanitarian Documentation
As international aid agencies adopt digital tools, using AI to create and review deliverable documentation offers both benefits and difficulties. A guide for project managers and compliance officers.
Read article →US Technology Lock-In, European Digital Sovereignty, and Vendor Revenue Destabilisation
Vendor lock-in extends beyond individual contracts and impacts geopolitics and regional strategic autonomy. Over 70% of European companies rely on at least one major US tech provider for core operations.
Read article →The Case for European Digital Sovereignty in 2026: A Matter of Strategic Imperative
In 2026, European technological autonomy has become an urgent strategic imperative rather than a theoretical policy debate. Digital sovereignty underpins the future security, economic competitiveness, and democratic resilience of the EU.
Read article →Ever wondered if Europe controls its own digital future? This isn't just about competition. It's about security, innovation, and strategic autonomy. In my latest article, I explore why 2026 is a decisive year for European digital sovereignty. We're at a crossroads: continue depending on foreign…
View on LinkedIn →The Annual PDR: Is It a Helpful Ritual or a HR Hangover?
For decades, the annual review has anchored corporate life. But in a fast-paced, iterative working environment, does a once-a-year ritual help us improve or do we stick with it out of habit?
Read article →The Sovereign Solution: How Proton Suite Offers a Viable Path to De-risk from US Tech Dependence
European reliance on US-based cloud infrastructure for core business operations is a strategic concern. Proton Suite offers a compelling, all-European solution for de-risking whilst keeping data within Europe.
Read article →