Beyond the edge: Orchestrating the UK’s software-defined future from 5G to 6G
03 March 2026
While the UK’s data centres provide the “brain” of the digital economy, the nervous system—composed of WAN, LAN, and the emerging 5G Standalone (5G SA) underlay—is undergoing a simultaneous and radical transformation. The convergence of software-defined architectures and advanced wireless is moving the UK from a “connectivity first” model to one of “intelligent orchestration.”
The UK’s wide area networking (WAN) landscape hit a critical inflection point this month with the £2 billion acquisition of Netomnia by nexfibre. This merger has created a unified metropolitan fibre giant, offering a direct challenge to BT Openreach’s wholesale dominance. For enterprise networking teams, this consolidation simplifies the “underlay” puzzle, providing a single, high-capacity fibre footprint across the UK’s major cities to support SD-WAN deployments.
Technical audits from February 2026 show that 100% of the UK’s leading SD-WAN vendors have now verified local Point of Presence (PoP) ownership in London and Manchester. This ensures sub-10ms latency for UK traffic—a technical prerequisite for the “Agentic AI” applications currently being trialled in the finance and legal sectors.
To co-locate or not to co-locate?
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03 March 2026
As UK enterprises rethink where their infrastructure should live, the old build-versus-buy debate is giving way to a far more complex set of choices around power, regulation, sustainability and flexibility.
For years, the question facing UK IT leaders seemed deceptively simple: build your own data centre or rent space in someone else’s. In 2026, that binary choice has quietly collapsed.
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Your infrastructure changed 50 times today. Your compliance check didn't
03 March 2026
Chad Richts, Director of Product Strategy, JupiterOne
Consider Klarna's reality: a fintech organisation with 30+ engineering teams, each managing its own cloud infrastructure. Every team deploys multiple times daily: new services, updated configurations, additional regions. The cloud inventory team attempted to maintain a master view of security controls across all these deployments using the traditional approach. The math simply broke. By the time they finished validating one quarter's infrastructure, hundreds of changes had already happened in the next. The compliance snapshot was outdated the moment it was complete.
Find out more Ransomware attacks: building a human firewall to defend against the rising threat
03 March 2026
Irvin Shillingford, Regional Manager Northern Europe, Hornetsecurity
2025 saw a surge in cyberattacks across nearly every industry ranging from car manufacturing to luxury fashion, few sectors have escaped unscathed. Last year marked a critical turning point, with our annual Ransomware Impact Report identifying the first rise in ransomware attacks in three years. This signals the end of a period of decline and the beginning of a renewed, intensified wave of cybercrime.
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