In 1999, while providing strategic advisory to the IBM Almaden Research Centre in Silicon Valley, I found myself writing about a concept that did not yet have a name. The idea was simple – leveraging the internet instead of having your own infrastructure. Service providers would offer storage and computing capacity on demand, allowing businesses to scale without investing heavily in their own infrastructure. Today, we call that cloud computing. At the time, it was the start of what might be possible.

Two decades later, it is the backbone of how organisations and individuals live and work. From the way families store photos to the way enterprises deliver services globally, the cloud has reshaped almost every part of daily life. To have written about it before the term even existed reminds me of an important truth. Innovation is rarely a sudden leap, but a process of connecting dots and anticipating human needs before they fully surface.

When I reflect on that early writing, it was never only about servers or data storage. It was about trust. The real question was not whether cloud was technically possible, but whether people would adopt it, whether businesses would feel confident in handing over their most valuable data, and whether the systems would be resilient enough to support growth at scale. This was before broadband internet revolutionised global access to people and information as a standard.

That same lens guides me today. Technology on its own is rarely the solution. It is only when it is combined with strategy, security and trust that innovation truly creates value. I describe this approach as intelligence led, secure by default. It means anticipating risks before they materialise through situational awareness and threat intelligence, embedding resilience into design rather than bolting it on as an afterthought, and ensuring that the human dimension is never lost in the pursuit of speed.

At ITSEC this philosophy drives the way we work. We are recognised internationally for our ability to conduct deep discovery and design frameworks that give organisations confidence to innovate securely through this approach.

When I wrote about cloud in 1999, I couldn’t have predicted every twist of the digital age. But I did learn that foresight requires more than technical knowledge. It requires asking different questions. What do people need? What do businesses fear? What makes communities resilient?

Those same questions remain at the heart of my work today, both personally and at ITSEC. The world will continue to evolve, faster and in more complex ways than we can imagine. But if we remain intelligence led and secure by default, we can not only adapt but thrive. For me, that is the lesson of the cloud. And it is the principle I carry forward as we shape the digital future here in the UAE and across the globe.