Daily Archives: January 25, 2026

When It Comes To Cyber The Midlands Defence Blueprint Is Polite Fiction

The Midlands Defence & Security Blueprint presents itself as decisive and strategic, but in reality it repeats the same structural failures that undermined Midlands Engine. Cyber remains subordinated, underfunded, and ownerless, while coordination is mistaken for delivery. Written from the perspective of a practitioner who has built cyber capability on the ground, this article argues that resilience will not come from another blueprint, but from funded authority, real centres, and delivery.

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The 2026 UK Financial Services Lakehouse Reference Architecture

An opinionated but practical blueprint for regulated, temporal, multi-domain data platforms: focused on authority, belief, and point-in-time defensibility. This article lays out a reference architecture for UK FS in 2026: not as a rigid blueprint, but as a description of what “good” now looks like in banks, insurers, payments firms, wealth platforms, and capital markets organisations operating under FCA/PRA supervision.

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