Technology Now · Hewlett Packard Enterprise

How do you cut off cloud computing from the internet?

April 10, 2025·23 min·2 clips

Rich Bird reveals how a disconnected cloud works like 'controlled chaos' for defense and sovereign governments.

This episode of Technology Now from HPE focuses on the concept of disconnected or air-gapped cloud computing, featuring guest Rich Bird, HPE's worldwide product marketing manager for GreenLake. The central question is how organizations that cannot or will not connect to the public internet can still benefit from modern cloud operating models. Rich Bird distinguishes disconnected cloud from older on-premises infrastructure by emphasizing that the management software itself—not just the workloads—runs fully isolated from the internet. NIST defines cloud computing through five characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measurable service. HPE GreenLake delivers all five in a disconnected environment, making it genuinely cloud-like rather than just a private data center. The primary customers are defense contractors, intelligence agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and highly regulated industries such as financial services, all of whom face either regulatory mandates or security imperatives preventing internet connectivity. Air-gap security in practice means physical disconnection combined with rigorous vetting of local nationals who have physical access to the equipment. Data sovereignty is a key differentiator: customers can verify that hardware, software supply chain, and all personnel with access are within specific national borders. The disconnected model does not mean all workloads stay on-premises; a hybrid fabric can route bursty or less-sensitive data to public cloud while keeping classified or regulated data fully isolated. HPE positions this as part of a broader hybrid cloud strategy where workloads move based on sensitivity and performance requirements. The episode includes a Today I Learned segment covering DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which has produced findings suggesting the cosmological constant—the driver of the universe's accelerating expansion—may itself be changing over time. This would challenge the standard Lambda-CDM cosmology model that has been the foundation of cosmology for decades. The This Week in History segment notes that the United States introduced daylight saving time on March 31, 1918, then repealed it just one year later after public backlash. A teaser for the following week hints at the 2019 Event Horizon Telescope achievement: the first photographic image of a black hole. The episode is aimed at IT decision-makers in government and regulated industries evaluating cloud adoption without internet connectivity.

As heard by us

A clear look at cloud control, sovereignty, and why some organizations want the internet out of the loop.

Technology Now treats cloud sovereignty as a concrete issue rather than a slogan. Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell keep the discussion focused on cloud storage security, bringing the cloud to the user, and the basic differences between cloud types, including what it means for a…

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If cloud sovereignty sounds abstract, this episode makes it concrete fast.

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