Steve Baxter

Sovereignty gets thrown around a lot in cloud conversations. With more datacentres being built in NZ and more opportunities to use “Sovereign” cloud. But what do we actually mean?    Here's the thing. Data location isn't sovereignty. Having a New Zealand subsidiary isn't sovereignty. Using local data centres operated by offshore companies isn't sovereignty either.   So, how do you tell if you have real sovereignty or just sovereignty theatre.   1. Who owns the company?  2. Are the people with access to your data employed in NZ?  3. Which government's laws apply?  4. Where do the profits go?  5. Who makes the final call when there's a data access request?   These aren't theoretical questions. They have real consequences for your organisation, your security, your compliance obligations, and New Zealand's digital economy.   How would you answer them? Are you prepared for the answers?   As on-premises solutions become more expensive and boards prepare to make critical cloud migration decisions. We need to make sure that sovereignty isn’t compromised:   1. True sovereignty means NZ ownership that pays taxes here and answers to our legal system. 2. Your data is only as secure as the people who can access it. 3. The US CLOUD Act and similar legislation can compel disclosure from NZ subsidiaries of foreign companies – often without notice to NZ authorities. 4. Economic sovereignty means building local capability, not just using foreign expertise. 5. If ultimate decision-makers are in foreign boardrooms, your sovereignty is theoretical at best.   What’s your road to sovereignty? To keeping New Zealand data in New Zealand? To building our economy, our capability and our digital infrastructure?

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Congratulations to STAC - Strategic Technology Analysis Center for their excellent conference in Sydney last week. As expected, the content was deep and informative and while it was great to be a panellist with James Corcoran Chris Horder Will Liang (with an excellent summary of the panel on Will's profile), the entire day was fully engaging and delivered to such a high standard. Some key observations throughout the day. • TradFi, CeFi and DeFi are coming to the table with very different technology stacks and heritage, they are cross-pollinating and learning from each other while the industries merge. • Where direct market access in TradFi would set you back a couple of million dollars, CeFi participants can gain this at a fraction of the cost, truly democratising this type of technology and participant access. For how long would this old model still stand in TradFi? • A lot of talk about the ASX taking responsibility to make sure their matching is fully deterministic, with predictable edge queuing and sequencing all the way to the matching engine. While this seems completely logical, I did sit in the audience wondering, who is going to pay for that expensive infrastructure and whether only certain business models really require it? • When I left High Frequency Trading in 2011, we were getting down to a single-digit NIC to NIC microseconds with software. Measurements can now be taken at the picosecond level (with light) and FPGA latency down to a few hundred nanoseconds. Mind-blowing fast tech. • Questions around the enterprise readiness and robustness of Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agentic systems, whether it has the maturity in failover, persistence and fault-tolerance. My suggestion was to change the transport layer to an alternative that has these enterprise attributes. • The trading infrastructure continues to improve in latency, bandwidth, throughput and efficiency, the industry is still demanding better performance across the whole technology stack. • STAC continues to evolve the benchmarks adding Gradient Boosted Trees to the Machine-learning inference benchmark (STAC-ML) due to their usefulness in the trading industry. • STAC-AI Benchmark results across NVIDIA A100, H100, H200 and GB200 are now available. With key results and insights shared for executives, data scientists and engineers. As you would expect it is impossible to write a concise summary for a day of such dense content and discussion. I would highly suggest checking out STAC Tokyo, or their other conferences if you get the chance. Capital markets remain a demanding and dynamic industry for technology, the arms race is far from over and the future with the merger of TradFi, CeFi and DeFi is going to keep things interesting for a long time. Still the place to be for blazing new trails in technology. #STACSydney #STAC #STACTokyo

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