A coffee with… Grant Caley, UK and Ireland Solutions Director, NetApp

Grant Caley, director for UK and Ireland at data infrastructure firm NetApp, has been at the company for over two decades, witnessing firsthand the evolution of technology customers and their needs.

Storage giant NetApp serves diverse clients, including public sector organisations, banks, US government departments, energy companies, and even Formula 1 teams.

Caley, who nowadays opts for a white Americano, started his technology career working with databases in the NHS and as a technical designer at IBM.

The self-professed gamer, who owns a Steam deck and VR headset, also touched on AI’s impact on customers’ sustainability and cybersecurity goals, the intricacies of working with motorsport data, and valuable lessons from the recent CrowdStrike Windows outage.

Five lessons from the CrowdStrike Windows IT outage

What has motivated you to stay at NetApp for 24 years?

The culture at NetApp has always been great. It’s constantly evolving with technological changes like AI and cloud computing. I’ve transitioned through various roles, starting in pre-sales in the UK, moving to a global role in pre-sales, and travelling the world for about seven years.

Eventually, I shifted to a chief technologist role in the UK, then into pre-sales management, and now I’m the pre-sales director. The variety and the great culture have kept me here.

Have you felt the effects of increasing use of generative AI?

We’re seeing a lot of interest and projects starting to spin up around generative AI. However, it’s still new territory for many customers who are figuring out how to use and integrate it with private data securely. The challenge is to use this technology efficiently while keeping data secure and sustainable.

Which industries are handling it the best?

It’s varied. Gen AI has applications across numerous fields — customer experience, programming, research, technical writing, and more. No single industry stands out because many are finding diverse and innovative uses for it. It’s like a Swiss Army knife; you need to figure out the best way to use it for your specific needs.

How do you address sustainability concerns regarding the use of AI?

AI relies heavily on data, which requires significant storage and processing power. We certainly talk to a lot of companies and advise them on optimising their data to use less infrastructure, which in turn uses less power and cooling.

One big mistake is just putting all of your data into generative AI — you don’t necessarily need to because a lot of it could be junk or irrelevant. Tidying up your data before feeding it in and using less data means less infrastructure, less cooling, and less energy.

Is data security a major consideration when exposing data to Gen AI models?

It does introduce new challenges. You’re exposing private and public data to these models. You need to think of the ‘cyber resilience wrapper’ that goes around this because using so much data makes your firm a target for cybercriminals.

Companies have to consider many additional considerations in that respect, not just using data but also securing it and ultimately making it recoverable.

If generative AI becomes critical to business operations and companies do get attacked, any loss could massively impact regulations. So, they must be fully secure and recoverable.

How did the CrowdStrike incident illustrate the risks of relying too heavily on a single vendor for IT security?

The CrowdStrike incident was interesting because it highlighted the reliance on single vendors for specific tasks within IT infrastructure. The FCA and the UK, for example, are introducing many rules about over-reliance on the cloud and warning financial services to be aware of this.

The DORA regulation has also arrived in Europe, making sure companies build protection mechanisms around that. If there is an outage in an environment, they’ve got the capability to fail over somewhere else and recover to keep on running to avoid these instances.

You can argue that the CrowdStrike incident was a wake-up call for many companies. Still, it will mean that we’ll start to see companies diversifying where they put their data and what technologies they use around it to ensure that they’re not reliant on single vendors.

How do motorsports teams exemplify strong data management practices?

We sponsor Aston Martin F1 and Porsche’s Formula E, and we’ve sponsored Ducati in Moto GP — I suppose someone on our marketing team must love racing.

Data in those sports is critical because every car and motorbike nowadays is almost like a mobile sensor array. They’re capturing video feeds and sensor feeds in real-time. All of that comes to the trackside, is manipulated to give the driver advice, and is then also passed to the design centre for onward processing and analytics.

Data is a huge driver of motorsports, and that’s one reason we work quite closely with those companies.

Although it doesn’t seem like it, you’d be amazed at some of the sustainability technologies they’re building into these cars. I think it’s good because those technologies will be in our cars five to six years from now, once they become commercialised.

Data comes into play when determining how much infrastructure you need to optimise. That’s a big part of what we do to help them be sustainable, at least on the infrastructure side.

How do you wind down and switch off at the end of a long day?

I’m a gadget geek. I enjoy playing with new technologies. My wife and I also enjoy walking with our two dogs in the Lake District, which is a great way to relax.

I’m into all kinds of gadgets, from smart home devices to gaming consoles like the Steam Deck and VR headsets. I can’t resist new and interesting tech.