By Alasdair Hill, Sales Director Northern Europe, Zadara
For many organisations, the cloud journey started with a relatively simple goal.
Reduce complexity. Increase flexibility. Move away from the burden of managing physical infrastructure.
For a long time, that worked.
Public cloud platforms transformed how businesses consumed IT resources, while virtualisation technologies like VMware enabled organisations to build resilient and efficient private infrastructure.
Today, however, the market looks very different.
Increasingly, organisations find themselves under pressure from multiple directions, forcing them to reassess technology decisions that once felt settled.
The challenge isn’t simply choosing the next platform.
The challenge is navigating an environment where costs, sovereignty, and long-term sustainability are all changing at the same time.
Organisations are Feeling Pressure from Both Sides
One of the most significant challenges many organisations face today is that they are being impacted simultaneously by changes in both the virtualisation market and the public cloud market.
For organisations heavily invested in VMware, recent licensing and commercial changes have created immediate concerns around long-term cost and viability.
At the same time, organisations that embraced public cloud are increasingly experiencing challenges of their own.
The result is that many IT leaders are finding themselves squeezed between two evolving markets, each presenting its own risks and uncertainties.
This is creating a level of complexity that many organisations simply haven’t had to navigate before.
The End of Predictable Costs?
For years, infrastructure planning was relatively straightforward.
Businesses built long-term business cases around predictable hardware refresh cycles, known licensing costs, and clearly defined budgets.
That predictability is becoming harder to achieve.
Many organisations are seeing significant increases in software and infrastructure costs, creating challenges for budgets that were developed under completely different assumptions.
The issue isn’t simply that costs are increasing.
It’s that many organisations are struggling to forecast what future costs might look like.
Without predictability, strategic planning becomes significantly more difficult.
Cloud isn't Always the Cheapest Option
When hyperscale cloud platforms first entered the market, they promised simplicity and flexibility.
For many workloads, they continue to deliver substantial value.
However, not every workload was designed for cloud.
Many organisations moved applications to hyperscale environments without fully redesigning them to take advantage of cloud-native architectures.
In some cases, the result has been increasing operational costs and diminishing financial returns.
What initially appeared to be an efficient long-term strategy can become significantly more expensive when workloads aren’t optimised for the environment in which they’re running.
This is prompting organisations to take a closer look at whether certain workloads still belong where they are today.
Sovereignty is No Longer a Niche Discussion
Alongside cost, sovereignty has rapidly moved up the strategic agenda.
For many years, sovereignty was viewed primarily as a concern for government departments and highly regulated industries.
That is no longer the case.
Across both public and private sector organisations, there is growing interest in understanding:
- Where data resides
- Who ultimately has jurisdiction over that data
- Which regulations apply
- How access is governed
As geopolitical uncertainty continues and regulatory requirements evolve, organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of maintaining control over critical information.
For many businesses, sovereignty is now viewed as a risk management issue rather than simply a compliance requirement.
Not Every Workload Belongs in the Same Place
One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing is a move away from one-size-fits-all cloud strategies.
Cloud absolutely has a role to play.
Private infrastructure has a role to play.
Certain workloads benefit from hyperscale environments, while others require greater control, lower latency, or stronger sovereignty guarantees.
The most successful organisations are no longer asking:
“Should we be in the cloud?”
Instead, they’re asking:
“Which platform is best suited to this workload?”
That subtle shift changes the entire conversation.
The Rise of AI is Adding New Requirements
Emerging technologies are also reshaping infrastructure strategy.
AI workloads often introduce unique requirements around performance, latency, security, and data governance.
As organisations begin to deploy AI more broadly, infrastructure decisions become increasingly important.
Questions around where data is processed, where models are hosted, and how information is protected are becoming critical considerations.
This places even greater emphasis on selecting the right environment for the right workload.
Looking Ahead
Over the next few years, I expect organisations will continue to face growing pressure from multiple directions.
Infrastructure costs are unlikely to decrease. Regulatory scrutiny will continue to increase. Data sovereignty will remain firmly on the agenda. And technologies such as AI will create entirely new requirements for how infrastructure is designed and operated.
As a result, organisations will increasingly move towards more flexible and deliberate cloud strategies. The future isn’t about choosing between public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises infrastructure. It’s about understanding the strengths and limitations of each approach and placing workloads where they make the most sense.
Because the organisations that succeed won’t necessarily be those with the most technology.
They’ll be the organisations that make the most informed decisions about where that technology should live.
About the Author:
Sales Director Northern Europe, Zadara
Alasdair works with organisations across Europe to help navigate changing infrastructure requirements, sovereign cloud strategies, and private cloud adoption. With extensive experience across managed services, cloud platforms, and enterprise infrastructure, Alasdair helps businesses balance performance, control, sovereignty, and cost in an increasingly complex technology landscape.
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This article is based on insights shared during Episode 5 of Trust Cloud Talks.