Global organizations are under relentless pressure from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. The number of enterprises reporting an increase in cyberthreats has risen 97 percent since 2022 alone. U.S. governmental agencies are not immune. Indeed, they are a primary target. And now, with federal IT modernization a mandate, a modern private cloud platform is a secure solution that in every way meets the moment.
A Challenging Status Quo
Cybersecurity poses major challenges for government agencies as it does for enterprises in the private sector. In some respects, the challenges are even greater.
Federal agencies are not ideally funded to deliver cybersecurity, and as a result, federal security systems tend to lag behind their commercial counterparts. And as the threat landscape continues to evolve, these challenges become even more complex.
While some federal agencies have sought to address these challenges by leveraging commercial-grade solutions in public clouds, these efforts have raised issues of cost overruns, management complexity, and even new security and privacy risks associated with migrating government and citizen data beyond agency control into a public cloud provider’s shared environments, which can be accessed by other entities.
A Modern Private Cloud Platform Approach
A modern private cloud platform offers the best approach to helping federal agencies meet these challenges. It allows agencies to take the very best-of-breed solutions from the commercial sector, including cybersecurity, and implement them in the fastest and most streamlined way possible.
A platform mentality ensures that agencies will not have seams in their IT systems that can shelter hidden vulnerabilities. A platform approach implemented with a software-defined, virtualized private cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) builds security directly into IT systems across the compute, storage, networking, and perimeter defenses of the private cloud.
Where the Magic Happens
Commercial enterprises know that interoperability and sharing of data requires effective and efficient security. It is the unseen substrate of organizational efficiency. This applies to any enterprise — from Big Box stores wanting to share their data in real-time with their financial partners, third-party delivery systems, and credit card payment systems. Private sector businesses know that interoperability of data is where the magic happens — but it’s also where most vulnerabilities happen.
Government agencies are in the same situation: interoperability of government payment systems and citizen data is central to their operations. It is why the U.S. Department of the Treasury chose VCF as their private cloud platform - to ensure that the sensitive citizen data received, collected, processed, and made available to other federal agencies by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from hundreds of million tax returns is secure and protected. Regardless of how that data is shared — for U.S. Census purposes or analytics— the data itself always remains secure because it’s managed in a private cloud platform.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is also already using a private cloud platform approach. VCF is the backbone of U.S. Cyber Command’s Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), our nation’s frontline training platform for global defensive and offensive cyber warfare.
National Security Demands Private Cloud
A private cloud operating model ensures an open architecture, open standards, and open ecosystems. That allows agencies to work effectively and efficiently with their partners internally as well as in other agencies. This is already common across the DoD. The open architecture is integral to the success of PCTE here in the United States and to our allies who utilize it around the world.
Private cloud allows agencies to create opportunities to explore cutting-edge capabilities, such as AI agents, blockchain, large language models (LLMs), and other advanced applications and services knowing that the data involved is secure and protected.
A private cloud operating model supports better use of IT funding for federal agencies, such as helping to integrate cybersecurity more seamlessly into federal IT modernization and ensure more efficient use of taxpayer dollars. The use of VCF, for instance, allows agencies to use the same management and operational tools with which they are already familiar without the need to rely on additional expertise.
Finally, a private cloud approach allows agencies to operate a world-class cloud but do it securely. Private cloud provides the best of both worlds: the scale and agility of public cloud with the security and performance advantages of private cloud. That’s why 73% of organizations are considering repatriation from public cloud to private cloud, with 45% having already repatriated some workloads. (Source: Private Cloud Outlook 2025)
With federal IT modernization a mandate, private cloud is a solution that truly meets the moment. The future of federal IT modernization is private.
Learn more from the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report