Businesses are increasingly seeking a “reset” of their cloud strategies and implementations are a range of concerns and issues cause firms of all sizes to think twice, new research has claimed.
Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report found private clouds are becoming an increasingly common presence for many businesses - with the vast majority (93%) saying they deliberately balance a mix of private and public clouds.
The research, which surveyed 1,800 senior IT decision-makers across the globe, found more than half (53%) saying private cloud would be their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while nearly three-quarters (73%) say they are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so.
Cloud reset
The research found a variety of factors influencing the shift towards public cloud, with security, cost and compliance standing out.
Overall, 92% of respondents said they trusted private cloud for security and compliance needs, 90% valued its financial visibility and predictability, and 60% said they preferred private cloud for AI model training, tuning and inference.
However, some major challenges often remain for firms looking to carry out this ‘cloud reset’, as a third (33%) named siloed IT teams as a challenge to private cloud adoption, and a similar proportion (30%) citing a lack of proper in-house skills or expertise as a major barrier, leaving 80% to depend on professional services for cloud-related needs.
“The fact is that if you're a serious enterprise today, you have to realise the answer to everything is not a public cloud or a collection of public clouds,” Joe Baguley, Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, Broadcom told TechRadar Pro at a press briefing announcing the research.
“Ultimately, it comes down to a very simple thing - you have to think about putting the right workload in the right place.”
“Our industry's history is littered with people looking for one platform that does it all,” he added, “(but) that does not exist - there is no one solution to everything an organization needs to do, there are various bits and technologies you need to bring together in a blended mix to meet the needs of your business, and you will not find that one public cloud will meet it all, and it's very unlikely you will find one private cloud that meets it all, as you need to have a blended mix.”
“When organizations get mature enough to realise that, that is when we see them moving forward."
"I frankly am tired of going into customers who tell me they are cloud-first....because what we see is that they tell us they are cloud first - but what they actually mean by is public cloud first,” Baguley also went on to say, “(and) frankly the state of their own on-prem infrastructure is not as shiny as it could be.”
Enterprises often still have some kind of a cloud-first policy, he outlined, but they have realized they need some form of private cloud too, typically due to the fact that some workloads do not meet the needs, mainly around cost, complexity and compliance.
However the problem is that because public cloud has taken priority, infrastructure has not grown in the right way - so increasingly, Broadcom’s conversations are now with customers realizing they need to focus on both public and private cloud, and some on-prem, Baguley says, as they're realizing, “we need to make sure we do it right, we're doing it in a cost-effective way, and we do it in a way that's actually going to be strategically sensible for us going forward.”
"In essence - they've realised they need to build something on-prem that can not only compete with public cloud, but actually be better in various categories, including cost, compliance and complexity.”
VCF 9.0 is here
In order to help with these concerns, Broadcom has released VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, the latest edition of its platform to help customers get the most out of private cloud.
Described by Baguely as, “the culmination of 25 years work at VMware”, VCF 9.0 offers users a single platform with one SKU - giving them improved visibility while supporting all applications (including AI) with a consistent experience across the private cloud environment.
“We are best of breed, there's no doubt about that,” Baguely concluded, “finally, we have the data and the reality that's happened in the world...and we are providing the best ever cloud platform to do that.”
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