By Ben Smoker, CEO of Sota
“The best cloud strategy isn’t about choosing sides; it’s about choosing sense”
There are few debates in modern IT quite as enduring as Private vs Public Cloud. Public promises limitless scale, innovation at speed, and global reach. Private promises control, sovereignty and predictability. As someone who operates a private-cloud platform, you might expect us to pick a clear winner but the truth, as ever, is more nuanced.
Hyperscaler Motives: Growth Before Pragmatism?
The hyperscalers have transformed the industry. Gartner predicts global public-cloud spend will reach $679 billion in 2025, up more than 20% in a year. It’s astonishing progress.
Yet their growth depends on one simple truth, the more workloads you place in their ecosystem, the more money they make. Every API call, storage gigabyte and AI inference feeds the consumption machine. That’s not sinister, its capitalism, but it does shape the advice customers receive.
So, it’s worth asking the question. Are they guiding your strategy, or just growing their own revenue?
Even their fabled reliability isn’t absolute. In June 2025, a major Google Cloud outage knocked out Spotify, Discord, and several Google services for hours. Two months later, IBM Cloud suffered its fourth major outage since May when authentication systems failed across regions.
When hyperscalers stumble, they take half the internet with them. Dependence has its price.
The Private-Cloud Resurgence
Private cloud has quietly undergone its own renaissance. Modern stacks, whether VMware Cloud Foundation or Nutanix, the hypervisors that underpin sovereign platforms such as our own SotaCloud, deliver the elasticity and automation once thought exclusive to public environments, but with the clarity and control enterprises crave.
The advantages are well publicised:
- Data Sovereignty & Compliance: You know exactly where your data lives and under which jurisdiction. For regulated sectors, that’s non-negotiable
- Transparent Pricing: Predictable monthly costs without opaque egress fees or hidden metering. No CFO nightmares!
- Consistent Performance: Hosting workloads close to users reduces latency and variance – critical for AI inference, trading, and real-time analytics
- Direct Accountability: When something needs fixing, there’s a name and a number – not a faceless global support queue
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2025 calls this shift “cloud pragmatism” moving from cloud-first to cloud-right, meaning selecting the best environment for each workload, not blindly defaulting to one model.
“Private cloud is no longer the cautious choice, it’s the considered one.”
Workload First, Not Revenue Targets
The most effective strategies start with the workload, not the vendor.
I encourage you ask your CTO’s simple questions such as:
- Does this application handle sensitive or regulated data?
- Does it demand ultra-low latency or local processing?
- Is usage stable or wildly variable?
- How much surprise billing can we tolerate?
Public cloud often wins for spiky, experimental, or globally distributed workloads. Private cloud excels where control, predictability, and proximity matter. Most mature organisations blend the two, using each where it makes sense.
McKinsey recently noted that 38% of enterprises have repatriated some workloads from public to private environments, largely for cost and compliance reasons. Even Andreessen Horowitz, an early cloud champion, dubbed hyperscaler dependency ‘the new IT tax’, warning that many firms ‘rent agility at the expense of long-term margins’.
The Balanced Reality
At Sota, we are proud of our sovereign, UK-based private cloud. We designed it for transparency, resilience, and human accountability. But we’re also pragmatic enough to know that not every workload belongs with us.
Sometimes the right answer is public, sometimes hybrid, sometimes both. The point is that the customer’s agenda, not the provider’s, must come first!
Conclusion: Value Over Vendor
Public cloud offers extraordinary innovation, but its motives and limits must be understood. Outages, opacity, and cost drift are part of the package. Private cloud, conversely, delivers sovereignty, predictability, and consistent performance – advantages that matter as AI, compliance and latency demands intensify.
The smartest organisations are no longer asking “Which cloud is best?” They’re asking, “Which cloud is best for this?”
Because the right cloud is not the one with the loudest marketing or the biggest logo, it’s the one that delivers control, performance, and peace of mind.
And if that happens to be a well-engineered private cloud..well..that’s simply good business sense.
