By Mark Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at Pulsant
For years, UK businesses have been steadily shifting away from relying on a single public Cloud provider for their digital infrastructure needs.
Recent findings from Vanson Bourne reveal that 87% of enterprise CIOs intend to partially or fully move away from the public Cloud within the next two years. Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts that by the close of 2026, organisations will have shifted 20% of their current workloads from global public Clouds to local or regional alternatives.
This raises two pressing questions for the industry: where exactly are these workloads going, and what is the best way to move them?
Rethinking Cloud strategy: cost, performance, compliance, and AI
Before anything else, we need to determine what the “right” home looks like for any given workload. While this varies from one organisation to the next, four key factors drive the decision: cost, performance, compliance, and the evolving demands of AI.
On the cost front, the biggest factor is how predictable the compute demand actually is. Handling sudden spikes in usage was — and still is — one of the public Cloud’s strongest selling points, since businesses only pay for what they use. However, many organisations have now recognised that steady-state, “always on” workloads are frequently more cost-effective when run on owned or co-located hardware.
A great deal of recent workload repatriation has been motivated by enterprises relocating these stable workloads to escape the “Cloud tax” of continuous uptime. The savings achieved are then often weighed against the egress fees that public Cloud providers charge to extract data from their platforms.
When it comes to performance, hybrid setups that combine on-premise systems, colocation, or regionally-based private Clouds offer shorter data transit distances — delivering the low latency that many businesses depend on. Edge computing is fundamentally about processing data as close as possible to where it is generated.
This approach boosts throughput and eases the burden on centralised servers. Response speed sits at the intersection of performance and cost. The “lag tax” is the hidden penalty a business incurs when data travels farther than necessary. Most organisations are paying this without realising it — it typically manifests as response times slower than ten milliseconds. Its effects show up as delayed decision-making, inconsistent performance, inflated bandwidth expenses, and compliance vulnerabilities.
Compliance has emerged as a major force shaping hybrid Cloud investment decisions. Research from Vanson Bourne indicates that 79% of businesses consider data sovereignty and residency to be a significant factor in their digital infrastructure spending.
There is a growing number of workloads that require the security of a sovereign private Cloud, or even the level of protection that only colocation or on-premise infrastructure can guarantee. Faced with the threat of GDPR penalties and a rising tide of cyberattacks, businesses increasingly want direct local control over their data.
Finally, there is the question of AI’s demands. AI has already compelled businesses to reconsider which workloads belong where. Edge-based private Clouds and colocation options are well-suited for inference AI (keeping processing near the end-user), but large-scale training for generative AI still calls for public hyperscale resources. For AI workloads especially, the “cost of distance” is significant, so any approach that avoids the expense of data replication and transit — such as Edge computing — is highly attractive.
It is worth remembering that businesses embrace hybrid architectures because they see clear advantages: flexibility across different environments that reduces operational risk; stronger compliance and data sovereignty; optimised performance; and the ability to modernise legacy systems that are both costly and represent a single point of failure.
So, once the question of where to migrate has been settled, the organisation must then figure out how to make the move.
Migration without disruption: strategies for a smooth transition
The starting point for any placement strategy — deciding where each workload should run — is a thorough assessment of existing applications and usage patterns. In practice, the most common approach for businesses moving toward hybrid infrastructure is to identify workloads with predictable, consistent resource consumption and shift them from the public Cloud to a private Cloud or colocation facility.
This lowers ongoing costs and — when working with a sovereign provider — ensures the data stays within the country.
This leads into the area of re-platforming. The process involves containerising the workload and relocating it to a regional Edge facility closer to the actual end-users. This setup allows the application to “burst” into the public Cloud when massive scale is needed, while running day-to-day operations at the edge for lower latency.
Moving workloads out of restrictive public Cloud environments means databases can take advantage of high-performance, sovereign private Cloud infrastructure while the application’s core code remains unchanged. Businesses gain significantly greater cost predictability and control, without losing the automation benefits that Cloud platforms provide.
The rewards of modernisation can be achieved without excessive development expenditure. By transitioning to sovereign, regional infrastructure, the organisation can meet compliance requirements under relevant legislation, while phased migrations help minimise operational risk.
Making it work: managing workloads across multiple environments
Once a business has embarked on a hybrid Cloud migration, it immediately confronts the challenge of managing workloads spread across multiple environments. Interoperability — ensuring that different systems work together to support growth and scalability — is absolutely essential.
The first step toward achieving interoperability is visibility. Unified management portals are critical tools that allow businesses to oversee workloads running on private Cloud, on-premise hardware, and public hyperscale platforms from a single interface. Visibility helps prevent operational “lock-in” because if a workload needs to scale, everything stays consistent and manageable.
Next, systems need to “work together” seamlessly at scale. Pulsant has made substantial investments in its robust 400Gbps private network, integrated with Megaport and LINX, transforming its estate of 14 data centres into Cloud on-ramps that deliver consistent scalability from anywhere across the UK.
The final step is cultivating an ecosystem of service partners who build interoperable solutions on top of this infrastructure. The aim is that any new business can simply “plug in and play” with services from the partner community without needing a complete architectural overhaul.
A hybrid Cloud migration presents a significant opportunity to realign a business with its infrastructure. It should deliver the chance to cut costs, reduce risk exposure, strengthen resilience, and free the business to focus on scaling.
Author biography:
Mark Lewis joined Pulsant as CMO in 2022. With over 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Mark began his career at 3Com Corporation and has held senior positions at Vodafone, Sony, and Criteo. He also spent five years leading corporate and field marketing at Interxion and Digital Realty. Before joining Pulsant, Mark was responsible for driving the commercial development of data centre ecosystems at Iron Mountain.
