By Phil Hilton, Senior Account Manager, Zadara
For many years, the cloud conversation was relatively straightforward.
Public cloud promised flexibility, scalability, and a simpler way to consume IT. For many organisations, it delivered exactly that. Businesses gained access to infrastructure on demand, avoided significant upfront investment, and accelerated digital transformation programmes.
Today, however, the conversation is changing.
Organisations are asking different questions. They’re looking more closely at cost predictability, data sovereignty, platform choice, and the level of control they have over critical workloads.
As a result, many businesses are beginning to reassess whether traditional cloud models still align with their long-term requirements.
The Cost Challenge Is Becoming Harder to Ignore
One of the biggest frustrations organisations face today is predictability.
Cloud was intended to provide flexibility, but flexibility doesn’t always translate to clarity.
Many organisations have found themselves dealing with increasingly complex billing models, unexpected charges, and costs that are difficult to forecast. While consumption-based pricing can be highly effective in some scenarios, it can also create challenges when workloads are stable and predictable.
Egress fees are a good example.
Moving data into a cloud platform is often straightforward and inexpensive. Moving that data back out, however, can become costly. For some organisations, this creates a feeling of being locked into a particular provider, making future strategic decisions more difficult.
The challenge isn’t simply about reducing costs.
It’s about understanding them.
Support Matters More Than Ever
As infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to business operations, the quality of support can have a significant impact on outcomes.
When systems experience outages or performance issues, organisations need rapid access to expertise.
Unfortunately, many businesses have experienced situations where resolving a critical issue means navigating forums, knowledge bases, automated systems, or chatbots before reaching a technical specialist. Technology platforms are important, but so is the support that surrounds them.
For organisations running business-critical applications, access to skilled engineers and responsive support remains a key consideration.
VMware Has Changed the Conversation
Few technologies have had the impact that VMware has had on enterprise IT.
For more than two decades, VMware enabled organisations to deliver greater efficiency, resilience, and workload density across their infrastructure environments. It became the foundation of countless private clouds and enterprise platforms around the world.
However, recent changes have forced organisations to reconsider their options.
Following VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, many organisations have experienced significant changes in pricing, licensing models, and access to the wider partner ecosystem.
As a result, businesses are increasingly asking:
- Is our current platform still sustainable?
- What alternatives exist?
- How do we reduce risk while maintaining continuity?
For many organisations, these are not future questions. They are questions that require answers now.
Why Sovereignty Has Become a Strategic Priority
Alongside cost and platform decisions, sovereignty has emerged as one of the most important discussions in cloud strategy.
Several factors are driving this shift.
Firstly, legislation and regulation continue to evolve, particularly around the handling and protection of sensitive information.
Secondly, the rapid growth of AI is increasing the importance of understanding where data resides and how it is used.
Thirdly, organisations are placing greater value on their data itself. Whether it’s customer information, intellectual property, or operational insights, data is increasingly viewed as a strategic asset.
Finally, there is the reputational impact associated with data breaches or misuse. The consequences extend far beyond regulatory penalties and can have lasting effects on customer trust.
For many organisations, sovereignty is no longer viewed as a technical consideration. It has become a business issue.
Cloud Isn't Going Away. It's Evolving.
It’s important to be clear: organisations are not abandoning cloud.
What we are seeing is a more mature and considered approach to cloud adoption.
Rather than defaulting to a single model, businesses are evaluating which workloads belong where and why.
Questions around cost, resilience, sovereignty, and operational simplicity are increasingly shaping decision-making.
This doesn’t mean replacing one trend with another.
It means building cloud strategies around outcomes rather than assumptions.
What Organisations Should Focus On
Regardless of industry or size, three priorities consistently emerge in conversations with customers:
Security
Protecting data and critical systems remains a top priority as threats continue to evolve.
Resilience
Workloads need to remain available, reliable, and capable of supporting business operations without interruption.
Predictable Costs
Organisations need greater confidence in what they are spending and why.
Success increasingly depends on balancing all three.
Looking Ahead
Over the next few years, I believe we’ll see continued change across the cloud market.
AI will move from experimentation towards practical business outcomes.
Organisations will continue to evaluate alternatives to VMware.
Cost pressures and sovereignty concerns will encourage businesses to take a more strategic view of cloud placement.
And perhaps most importantly, organisations will become increasingly focused on choosing the right platform for the right workload rather than following a single technology trend.
The cloud journey is far from over.
But the next phase will be defined by choice, control, and a deeper understanding of what organisations truly need from their infrastructure, allowing IT teams to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time enabling the business..
About the Author:
Phil Hilton
Senior Account Manager, Zadara
Phil works with managed service providers and enterprise organisations across EMEA to deliver private cloud, virtualisation, storage, and AI infrastructure solutions. He specialises in helping organisations navigate changing technology landscapes while balancing performance, security, sovereignty, and cost.
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This article is based on insights shared during Episode 3 of Trust Cloud Talks.