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Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

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Financial considerations for Māori and NZ Data Sovereignty

According to this article the uncertainty with the foreign exchange and the $NZ loosing to the $USA, cloud computing has increased by 14% since September 2024. In addition to the international uncertainly with global events and the need to maintain security and budgets are all creating risks for New Zealand businesses that use cloud computing.

“If you were doing your opex budgets at the start of September 2024, when the exchange rate was 0.6345, now on January 7 at 0.5650, you will need to add another 13.5 per cent to the cost of every US dollar-based SaaS, PaaS or IaaS you have.”

Large businesses will have CIO’s and other staff that will have forecast these issues and will have contingency in place. But for smaller organisations such as SME’s, NFP’s, iwi, hapū and marae these costs could be financially crippling.

There are a number of cloud providers in New Zealand including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS with open source and proprietary), and serverless computing all of which have their various benefits and cons.

The article highlights the need for better planning of cloud solutions and considerations of data repatriation back to New Zealand or a mixture while also applying Māori Data Governance practices.

Again, this is another opportunity for Iwi and Māori to invest in cloud infrastructure and data centres as partners or as sole owners as Ngāti Toa have already done. Many Iwi are still grasping with the value and how to extract the power from their own data which is likely creating barriers to further Iwi and Māori economic investments.

As a consumer and active participant in many communities in New Zealand, I see the primary issue is a lack of marketing that caters to non technical customers, with an emphasis on large corporate customers who will have both the accounting and IT expertise to deal with these matters.

This, despite SME’s make a significant contribution to the New Zealand economy, accounting for 97% of all New Zealand businesses and employing more than 679,000 people or 29.3% of all New Zealand employees generating over a quarter of New Zealand gross domestic product.

Again, this is another opportunity for Iwi and Māori to invest in cloud infrastructure and data centres as partners or as sole owners as Ngāti Toa have already done. Many Iwi are still grasping with the value and how to extract the power from their own data which is likely creating barriers to further Iwi and Māori economic investments.

The Māori and Iwi contribution to the New Zealand economy and Trade includes:

I suspect until we see cloud providers in New Zealand adapting their marketing and sales tactics, we will continue to see confusion in the market.

 

DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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