i2Coalition Member Spotlight Q&A: DigitalOcean

Founded in 2012, DigitalOcean introduced the Droplet, an easy-to-use virtual machine that can be spun up in a few minutes. This innovative company has since expanded to offer a full suite of services for individual developers as well as small- to medium-sized businesses—from simple virtual machines to AI workload enablement.

DigitalOcean is a member of the i2Coalition, taking part in the Cybersecurity and Privacy Working Group as well as the Technology and Trade Working Group.

We caught up with DigitalOcean’s Ghazal Niazi (Senior Privacy and Security Counsel) and Brad Harrison (Deputy General Counsel, Head of Product, Business Affairs, Security/Privacy, and Litigation Legal) to discuss cloud computing, AI, and the human touch. 

i2Coalition: Can you give us the elevator pitch for DigitalOcean?

Ghazal Niazi: We provide a simplified, powerful experience for working with cloud computing resources.

Brad Harrison: With DigitalOcean, you get the focus as an SMB customer that you wouldn’t get from hyperscalers. I think that’s really where we shine: providing a place where a lot of smaller and medium-sized businesses can come and start growing with our services without a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting.

i2Coalition: The Droplet was a developer tool, and you’ve since expanded to serve SMBs. Is there a through-line that runs through DigitalOcean’s product offerings?

BH: I think its simplicity is really the main through-line. So many of these tools are important for developers but they’re often really hard to get going or sometimes overwhelming to set up and manage. That’s why we really focus on simplicity of use, and we’re obsessed with the customer experience. The result is a set of tools where you don’t need a 10-person developer team to use them. You can have one developer who can come in and get going.

i2Coalition: What impact has the rapid growth of AI had on your service offerings?

BH: Being customer obsessed, we’re listening closely to the needs of our customer base, and right now, customers want infrastructure to support AI workloads! Our Paperspace business is working hard to offer cutting edge AI infrastructure solutions to meet customers’ evolving AI needs.

i2Coalition: How do you see Cloudways [managed cloud hosting] and Paperspace [AI model building and scaling] influencing each other? 

BH: Cloudways is like DIFM [Do-it-for-me] website building and hosting service, but for a full cloud computing experience. Paperspace is similar in terms of user-friendliness, but for running AI workloads beyond just “Okay, here’s your GPU, now go compute something!” We have all these other layers, helping our customers to create, train, and run their AI models.

i2Coalition: Why did your team find it important to join the i2Coalition?

BH: Staying on top of incoming regulations is very important to us. We wanted to ensure we put our minds together with others in our same industry who think like us and have similar interests as us. The other i2Coalition member companies were really great about letting us sit in on a couple of meetings and we realized it makes sense to join the i2Coalition to help tap into this great resource. It’s very clear others within this group are dealing with a lot of the same issues, and we’ve already gotten a lot of value out working with other member companies. 

i2Coalition: Which i2Coalition initiatives connect most deeply with your team’s ethos?

BH: For us, the Cybersecurity and Privacy Working Group as well as the Technology and Trade Working Group are great fits right away.

i2Coalition: Where does government policy interface with your work on a daily basis?

GN: Working in cloud computing, AI, and related spaces, we constantly have to look around corners to see what regulatory or legislative issues are coming. These local regulations have global implications, so we want a voice in that policy discussion around how we should be approaching these sorts of novel issues, so innovation isn’t getting stifled.