As sponsors of next week’s MD Future 26, Pulsant are at the heart of some of the conversations shaping the future of the region’s digital economy. In this edition of In The Spotlight, we speak to Danny Roscoe, Client Manager, about the changing infrastructure landscape - from the growing importance of data sovereignty and the pressures of AI on infrastructure, to the shift towards hybrid cloud strategies and the role resilient, secure infrastructure can play in helping businesses scale.
Introductions
Tell us a little about your roles — what do you each do at Pulsant, and what does your day-to-day look like in Manchester?
As the UK’s #1 provider of regional digital infrastructure, a typical day for my team is spent talking to organisations about their digital strategy, what they are doing to address their biggest challenges, and how they are taking advantage the opportunities that technology can offer to meet their objectives. Our Manchester data centre NW-1 is in-between the famous Kellogg’s factory and the Trafford Centre, so luckily we’ve got breakfast, lunch and dinner covered!
What types of organisations are you currently working with across Greater Manchester and the North West?
We work with a range of organisations, including both end-user clients, and technology partners who use Pulsant technology to underpin their own services. We host technology for public and private companies of all shapes and sizes, from innovative startups to critical national infrastructure. Some organisations use our colocation facilities in one or more of our 14 DC locations, some leverage our UK-sovereign private cloud / IaaS platform, most using our secure backend network.
Data Sovereignty & Insights From the Report
Pulsant’s Data Sovereignty & AI Infrastructure report highlights strong regional sentiment around compliance, performance and cloud cost-control. What stood out most to you from the findings — particularly from North West respondents?
Most apparent across Pulsant research was that 87% of organisations plan to move away from public cloud as the impact of data sovereignty and residency on investment starts to change perceptions. While this might not mean wholesale migration/repatriation, it is often specific applications and workloads where it makes sense. This is echoed by various global analysts such as Gartner, who predict global sovereign cloud IaaS spending will increase by 36% this year.
Are you seeing local businesses re-evaluate their public cloud strategies? What’s driving this shift?
Organisations today are faced with what feels like exponentially increasing client demands, in the face of spiralling internal costs that put pressure on investment. So most companies are re-evaluating how they deliver digital services to ensure they are getting the best ROI. Factors such as changing regulatory requirements, cost overruns, performance issues, security concerns, and well-publicised challenges in service availability in public cloud platforms are all driving these thought processes.
At a recent Manchester Digital Ecommerce event, many of these points were brought up by IT teams and service providers alike, especially sovereignty, and rising cost in cloud as platforms scale. MD Ecom 26: The roundup
How critical is sovereign, UK-based data hosting becoming for organisations in regulated sectors such as financial services, health, and e-commerce?
While the UK currently maintains a strong level of alignment with European regulations, particularly through GDPR, this may well change in the future.
As UK-specific regulatory expectations around data protection, resilience, and operational control tighten, and drift apart from EU rules, sovereign, UK-based data hosting is becoming increasingly critical for organisations operating in regulated sectors.
Keeping sensitive data within UK jurisdictions can help organisations meet compliance obligations, reduce exposure to geopolitical risks, and maintain greater oversight over where data is stored, accessed, and processed.
For financial institutions handling client and transaction data, healthcare providers managing highly sensitive patient records, and e-commerce businesses processing large volumes of personal information, data sovereignty is becoming a key component of risk management and customer trust.
Beyond compliance, UK-based hosting can support faster incident response, stronger governance, and greater confidence that critical services remain aligned with national security, privacy, and industry-specific requirements.
Manchester Market Perspective
What are the most common infrastructure challenges or questions you’re hearing from Manchester-based organisations right now?
A key challenge we are seeing is the shortage in infrastructure hardware, with almost all vendors reporting increased pricing and months-long lead times. The shortage is being driven by high demand for RAM, as more companies (and especially the big US hyperscalers) are using it for AI-based systems. Dell predicted a 625-fold increase in demand for memory. This increases time-to-market, at a time when businesses need to stay agile and acutely client focussed, and many of which want to explore their own use of AI.
Another challenge is IT budget limitations that impact infrastructure investment. Budgets have always been under pressure, however this has been exacerbated recently by increased and unpredictable internal costs across the business, making it difficult to plan effectively.
Finally, infrastructure complexity remains a major challenge, both as businesses scale up and also as a result from increasing M&A activity. This can result in disparate and siloed systems that are difficult to manage and protect.
All these factors are leading to increasing demand for enterprise IaaS services, which provide a ‘cloud-like’ experience with vastly quicker times to deploy, but with lower and more predictable operational costs, and on sovereign architecture that improves compliance.
In your view, what differentiates Pulsant’s Manchester data centre from other options available to organisations in the region?
Pulsant have invested £4.5m in our Manchester NW-1 data centre to provide enterprise-class, secure hosting and private cloud facilities to the regional economy, with a standardised approach to operations and the ability to host infrastructure supporting AI and other innovative digital solutions.
A unique feature of NW-1 is Pulsant’s Edge Fabric network that connects to our 13 other regional locations, plus 1700+ global DCs and 300+ major service and cloud providers e.g. Azure, AWS and GCP. This allows interconnectivity and collaboration on a different scale across the UK and beyond.
Our Manchester DC also offers direct connectivity to the London Internet Exchange (LINX), and has a sister facility in Rotherham to provide low-latency disaster recovery for critical workloads. Whether a scale-up or distributed business requiring a quarter rack, or a well-established organisation needing 10+ racks, our Manchester DC is a safe harbour with a friendly and experienced local team.
How is Pulsant supporting digital and tech businesses that are looking to scale responsibly, manage risk, or improve sustainability?
Brand reputation and trust is increasingly vital factor for success to organisations, both to their clients and their partners – a hot topic at many recent Manchester Digital events.
Maintaining sustainable and responsible practices has become a key factor in technology decisions, both in term of ESG considerations, but also in revenue generation and risk management. Many end clients require their suppliers to demonstrate a strong sustainability ethos before awarding business.
As a responsible data centre operator, sustainable practices are at the heart of our business, for example with our use of renewable energy, and our 100% offset of scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions. This is both good for the environment, and also helps clients scale efficiently, and minimises power costs. Our UK sovereign platform also helps drive investment across multiple regional economies, and also helps mitigates exposure to regulatory and security risks.
Community, Partnerships & Regional Engagement
Why is it important for Pulsant to be visible and active in the Greater Manchester digital ecosystem?
A recent Bloomberg article reported that Greater Manchester’s economy has been growing at twice the UK’s national rate, evidenced that since 2017, the number of skyscrapers in the city has increased sevenfold.
The recently announced (March 2026) government Manchester Digital Campus further underlines Manchester’s place as the UK’s second tech hub, bringing together nearly 9000 people from multiple government departments with a focus on digital work. This will have a wider positive effect on the UK North regional economy as a whole.
This is testament to the entrepreneurial culture of Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, and where the world’s first world's stored-program electronic computer was invented. So it is no surprise that the digital ecosystem here is strong, with a thriving knowledge-based economy, which is driving the wider boom in the region.
Being part of this landscape is extremely important to Pulsant as we help businesses to harness technology to achieve their objectives, and to deliver exceptional digital experiences to their clients.
How do local partnerships — like working with Manchester Digital — help strengthen your work in the region?
At Pulsant, we pride ourselves on building close partnerships with regional industry and business groups. With 14 data centres and 3 UK offices we are lucky to operate in most major UK metropolitan regions, and the work of organisations such Manchester Digital helps foster collective growth by promoting good practice, sharing industry expertise, and identifying new opportunities to collaborate.
Pulsant have an Ecosystem team who partner with national and regional technology providers to deliver exceptional digital experiences to clients. A significant percentage of our business is delivered through MSP’s and consultancy partners, who use our platform to provide richer services to their own clients.
What emerging trends should North West businesses be preparing for in 2026 when it comes to AI, cloud, security and compliance?
In Pulsant’s research, 78% of UK businesses rank AI in the top three changes having the
biggest impact on their data strategy. PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey found that while close to a third (30%) of businesses increased revenue from AI in the last 12 months, and a quarter (26%) are seeing lower costs, more than half (56%) say they’ve realised neither revenue nor cost benefits.
So the big question remains how to take advantage of the AI wave whilst keeping data secure and compliant. This is what is shaping the increasing trend for sovereign solutions, that can offer similar ROI and client experience, whilst minimising exposure to regulatory and security risks.
Closing
Finally, what advice would you give to organisations reviewing their data strategy for 2026? Where should they start?
Whether an organisation leverages bought-in software, or if it develops its own code, or if indeed it is a SaaS company - its data and IP is never more critical than it is today in driving value for its clients. In that context, data is becoming more diverse and more distributed, making it more complicated to extract the value that it holds. Keeping this data, and the applications that support it available, compliant, and protected is crucial to success.
Given it can take a long time to understand this, it is vital to think about the long-term consequences of where data resides and how it is accessed. While public cloud remains a good home for many scenarios, I’d advise all organisations to put the foundations in place for building a hybrid data strategy that aligns with their business objectives, and can deliver the exceptional client experience that today’s market demands.
Thanks Danny!
To find out more about Pulsant, click here.
- BBC | Could Manchester be a model for the UK to kickstart growth? 15-Feb-26
- PwC | 29th Global CEO Survey 19-Jan-26
- Bloomberg | Manchester Shows What UK Economic Revival Can Look Like 29-Jan-26
- IT Channel Oxygen | European sovereign cloud spending to soar 83% in 2026 – Gartner - 11-Feb-26
- https://www.pulsant.com/knowledge-hub/blog/2025-the-year-of-data-repatriation
- https://itchanneloxygen.com/memory-crisis-like-the-superbowl-for-us-michael-dell-says/
- https://www.gov.uk/government/news/manchester-digital-campus-confirmed
