ranging from traditional applications to cutting-edge AI/ ML workloads,” argue VMware executives. “No longer considered a legacy solution, modern private cloud now delivers the scalability, agility and developer velocity typically associated with public cloud – with continuous compliance and powerful cybersecurity and resilience.” The research suggests that both public and private cloud environments are delivering value but with slightly different strengths. Both deployment types receive high satisfaction for reliability and the simplification of IT/operations, but the highest satisfaction score for public cloud was scalability, while the highest satisfaction score for private cloud was security. Indeed, security is a top driver for private cloud deployments, while protecting private data stored in public services was the top-rated challenge of public cloud adoption. Security concerns were cited as the main barrier to public cloud adoption, as well as a top obstacle to deploying generative AI workloads. Security also was the leading reason for repatriating workloads from public cloud to private, showed the survey. Overall, 44 percent of organizations rank strengthening cloud security and resilience among their highest cloud priorities for the next three years. Similarly, “The global and shared nature of public cloud services creates significant concerns about the ability to manage compliance for data stored in public clouds,” VMware reported. Sixty-six percent of respondents reported being “very” or “extremely” concerned with storing data in public cloud environments, while 61 percent were “very” or “extremely” concerned with keeping up to date with changing compliance requirements. At the same time, 92 percent of organizations say they trust their private cloud with security and compliance. Respondents revealed other chinks in the armor of public cloud services that could be pushing IT decision makers toward private options. Nearly half of organizations (49 percent) believe more than a quarter of their public cloud spend is wasted, and 31 percent think that waste exceeds 50 percent. Only 6 percent, meanwhile, believe they are not wasting any public cloud spend, said respondents. On the flip side, nine out of 10 IT decision makers said they value the financial visibility and predictability of private cloud. A majority of respondents also agreed that organizational silos complicate cloud management, making it difficult to maintain visibility, control and governance in the public cloud. About three quarters think that public cloud is creating new non-core IT silos, and these silos are deploying resources which may not follow policies or best practices. A full 70 percent believe these silos make it difficult for IT to govern cost and security. Incidentally, years of public cloud investment have not significantly shorted the in-house talent gap. More than half (52 percent) of organizations rely on professional services for specific cloudrelated needs, and 28 percent said they are heavily dependent on professional services for all aspects of cloud adoption, migration and operation. “Paradoxically, 56 percent say they are staffed to run large IT footprints in their own data centers or co-location sites, and one-quarter are even extending services to edge locations,” said VMware researchers. “The challenge is less about headcount than about evolving existing skills to meet cloud transformation efforts.” The biggest hurdles associated with private cloud, meanwhile, are siloed IT teams and the prevalence of a legacy IT operating model. When it comes to platform choices for AI, early industry predictions of single-vendor stacks and bare-metal solutions have not materialized, said WMware. The environments that organizations are using or planning to use for generative AI breaks down as 56 percent public, 55 percent private and 17 percent bare metal, suggesting organizations value cloud capabilities for complicated AI workflows, such as automation and resource sharing. “These figures echo the broader cloud strategy trends in this report: organizations intentionally balance public and private cloud resources to meet security, cost and performance goals,” said the VMware study. “Although GenAI introduces fresh challenges, it’s seen as just another complicated workload that benefits from cloud capabilities.” Rather than focusing on “public or private,” IT leaders ultimately want the “best of both,” VMware’s findings show, in which they enjoy all the benefits of a cloud operating model with the control, security and predictability of a dedicated environment. In fact, 90 percent of IT decision makers say their ideal setup is a private cloud that delivers those combined benefits. “The findings indicate that cloud environment suitability is not actually being determined by whether the application is a particular technology, like virtual machines or containers, but instead by matching the needs of the application to available cloud platform characteristics,” concluded the report. o Workloads Being Repatriated High security or compliance concerns 51% Data-intensive 46% High levels of integration with other systems 41% Customer-facing 37% Latency-sensitive 36% Mission-critical 36% Modern (cloud-native) 34% Back-office 31% Traditional 31% Source: VMware by Broadcom Source: VMware by Broadcom 46 CHANNELVISION | SUMMER 2025
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