IT Essentials: The sovereign case for private cloud

Build local, trust local

With promised savings not materialising and uncertainty from across the Atlantic, a reaction is starting against public cloud.

The cloud has long been sold as the go-to compute platform. Savings! Scale! Security! Other people’s tin the cloud has it all!

It’s only in recent years that the cracks have started to appear. Companies are realising that moving all their data and workloads to the public cloud hasn’t been the big saving it was sold as. In fact, working on-prem might not actually be all that bad.

I was at a briefing with VMware this week, which does have a vested interest in promoting private cloud but made some good points that line up with what we’re seeing in the market.

VMware’s argument is that the cloud journey goes: On-prem > Public cloud > Repatriation > Private cloud; companies moving through each step to address the weaknesses of the one before.

This week Microsoft became the latest hyperscaler to announce its own sovereign cloud in an attempt to allay fears about cloud security and compliance (and keep people from moving away from Azure). But just because Microsoft calls something sovereign doesn’t make it so; the company, like others in the US, still has to bow to local law. The uncertainty from Donald Trump’s re-election, plus a huge uptick in cyberattacks and espionage cases, are causing many to re-evaluate the risk of the US public cloud and consider locally hosted alternatives.

One British institution that stands to benefit from the growing wariness around public cloud is the NHS, which – for the most part – has kept most workloads and data on-prem, either due to lack of budget or for compliance reasons.

Some NHS organisations are already experimenting with tools like AI, which are increasingly being run in private cloud. With the government increasingly pushing AI in healthcare, the sector now has an opportunity to increase efficiency and save costs by skipping straight to the last step of the cloud journey.

To learn more about the use of AI in the NHS, read Penny Horwood’s interview with Jeffrey Wood of the Princess Alexander Healthcare Trust, who – unusually for the health service – is rejoicing in his team’s agility.

John Leonard has taken a closer look at Microsoft’s so-called sovereign cloud, and the results are less than encouraging.

We’ve also released the 2025 edition of our annual IT Leaders 100 list this week, where we recognise the most influential, innovative and inventive people working at the top of UK tech. These are the people really driving the sector forward, and it’s our honour to celebrate them.

Finally, if you have an interest in future tech, be it software or hardware – and let’s be honest, everyone in IT should have – click this link to register for our event on Wednesday 25th June, where we’ll be cutting through vendor hype and buzzwords to talk about how these elements are in use today, and how you can future-proof your estate for tomorrow. The afternoon is for IT professionals who are either planning a move, in the middle of one, or have finished and are ready to share what they've learned.