Cloud computing has been viewed as a desired operating model for well over a decade now, as organizations looked to modernize infrastructure and applications and compete digitally. It is not hard to find opinions about cloud technology and its degrees of adoption. The industry conversation about cloud ranges from extolling the virtues of public cloud services as the panacea of modern IT, to the rising interest in workload repatriation to private clouds as a stern reaction to rising cloud costs, complexity, and security concerns. And, the degree of passion people have for their views on cloud can be intense.
After the initial cloud rush was sparked by business units and developers using public cloud services before IT formally adopted them, the conversation hasn’t progressed much. “Cloud first” as both a slogan and strategy continues to linger with the same group-think as when it started. This dogma asserts that “cloud” means “public cloud”, and the only goal is to move everything to it.
This “cloud first” opinion ignores the fact that despite the gains in scale and agility enabled by public cloud, organizations have also discovered universal challenges around cost, complexity, and compliance that remain stubbornly persistent.
In the meantime, the world around us has continued to change. New business models, increased security risks, evolving compliance requirements, shifting geo-politics, and the advent of new technologies, notably generative AI, are all placing new demands on IT.
In response, the conversation is changing.
Now, more than ever, the talk is around private cloud, a concept that was met with equal parts excitement and disappointment in its early days, as the first generation of private cloud solutions failed to live up to the standards of modernization that public cloud services had set.
But with interest again on the rise and more advanced technologies and solutions now available, has the moment for a modern private cloud arrived at last?
This is a time for facts, not opinions, and so Broadcom commissioned an independent and vendor-agnostic study on the role of private cloud. Our research partner surveyed 1800 senior IT decision makers around the globe, covering a wide range of industry types and organization sizes, to explore how businesses are re-thinking their cloud strategy.
Topics included:
- What are the perceptions of cloud today?
- Where have organizations succeeded and failed with public cloud?
- What are they doing with private cloud, and is it working?
- How do their 3-year cloud priorities line up with those of their peers?
- Where are people looking to run GenAI?
The research uncovered critical insights, including:
- The increasingly important and strategic role of private cloud as a platform for both new and existing applications;
- Surprising revelations around what is actually driving workload repatriations from public to private cloud; and
- Lessons that can be learned from organizations who are accelerating their delivery of cloud business benefits while minimizing the cost, risk, and effort to achieve them through private cloud technology
We are delighted to bring you the inaugural Private Cloud Outlook 2025: The Cloud Reset, to help you find your own answers to these and other cloud questions. This independently researched report is free to everyone so that we can all better learn from each other about private cloud—what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next.