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Private Cloud Outlook 2025: A Definitive Cloud Reset

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom.

More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so.

Private cloud is also now a strategic equal for AI and cloud-native apps, with 66% preferring to run container and Kubernetes-based applications on private cloud or a mix of public and private, while 55% prefer private cloud for AI model training, tuning and inference.

"This report makes it clear: private cloud is a strategic platform for IT modernization," said Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Product Marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation Division (VCF) at Broadcom. "Customers are intentionally architecting for flexibility, placing workloads in environments that offer the best balance of performance, control, and cost efficiency. The cloud reset presents an opportunity to create a more effective, secure and cost-efficient IT environment. Organizations that strategically adopt a modern private cloud can better support secure GenAI innovation, improve fiscal visibility, and accelerate workload repatriation."

Security, GenAI, and Cost Predictability Accelerate the Shift to Private Cloud

As IT leaders modernize their infrastructure, they are increasingly turning to private cloud to meet a range of critical needs, from securing sensitive data to managing unpredictable GenAI workloads to improving financial visibility.

  • 92% trust private cloud for security and compliance needs.
  • 66% are "very" or "extremely" concerned about public cloud compliance, and security is cited as the leading driver for workload repatriation from public cloud.
  • Data privacy and security concerns (49%) top the list of GenAI adoption challenges.
  • Organizations are choosing private cloud environments for AI workloads at nearly the same rate as public cloud (55% vs. 56%).
  • 90% value private cloud’s financial visibility and predictability.
  • 94% report at least some level of waste on public cloud spend.
  • 49% believe more than 25% of their public cloud spend is wasted, creating significant optimization opportunities.

Accelerating the Private Cloud Momentum

Real-world public cloud experiences, the rapid rise of GenAI workloads, and increasing demands for security, compliance, and cost predictability are driving this strategic cloud realignment. To fully capitalize on private cloud advantages, organizations must address two key challenges: overcoming siloed IT teams and a perpetuating skills gap.

Respondents identified siloed IT teams present the greatest challenge to private cloud adoption (33%), and 30% cite a lack of in-house skills/expertise as a barrier to private cloud adoption. Organizations that transition from technology silos to platform teams can focus on upskilling staff to permanently close the skills gap and reduce reliance on professional services. The report found that 81% are now structuring their technical organizations around a platform team rather than technology silos.

Methodology: The report is based on a global survey conducted by market research firm Illuminas on behalf of Broadcom. The survey was fielded from March 6 to April 4, 2025, and included 1,800 senior IT decision-makers across small, medium-sized, and large enterprises in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Respondents represented sectors such as financial services, government, healthcare, insurance, and pharmaceuticals.

The Latest

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Private Cloud Outlook 2025: A Definitive Cloud Reset

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom.

More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so.

Private cloud is also now a strategic equal for AI and cloud-native apps, with 66% preferring to run container and Kubernetes-based applications on private cloud or a mix of public and private, while 55% prefer private cloud for AI model training, tuning and inference.

"This report makes it clear: private cloud is a strategic platform for IT modernization," said Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Product Marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation Division (VCF) at Broadcom. "Customers are intentionally architecting for flexibility, placing workloads in environments that offer the best balance of performance, control, and cost efficiency. The cloud reset presents an opportunity to create a more effective, secure and cost-efficient IT environment. Organizations that strategically adopt a modern private cloud can better support secure GenAI innovation, improve fiscal visibility, and accelerate workload repatriation."

Security, GenAI, and Cost Predictability Accelerate the Shift to Private Cloud

As IT leaders modernize their infrastructure, they are increasingly turning to private cloud to meet a range of critical needs, from securing sensitive data to managing unpredictable GenAI workloads to improving financial visibility.

  • 92% trust private cloud for security and compliance needs.
  • 66% are "very" or "extremely" concerned about public cloud compliance, and security is cited as the leading driver for workload repatriation from public cloud.
  • Data privacy and security concerns (49%) top the list of GenAI adoption challenges.
  • Organizations are choosing private cloud environments for AI workloads at nearly the same rate as public cloud (55% vs. 56%).
  • 90% value private cloud’s financial visibility and predictability.
  • 94% report at least some level of waste on public cloud spend.
  • 49% believe more than 25% of their public cloud spend is wasted, creating significant optimization opportunities.

Accelerating the Private Cloud Momentum

Real-world public cloud experiences, the rapid rise of GenAI workloads, and increasing demands for security, compliance, and cost predictability are driving this strategic cloud realignment. To fully capitalize on private cloud advantages, organizations must address two key challenges: overcoming siloed IT teams and a perpetuating skills gap.

Respondents identified siloed IT teams present the greatest challenge to private cloud adoption (33%), and 30% cite a lack of in-house skills/expertise as a barrier to private cloud adoption. Organizations that transition from technology silos to platform teams can focus on upskilling staff to permanently close the skills gap and reduce reliance on professional services. The report found that 81% are now structuring their technical organizations around a platform team rather than technology silos.

Methodology: The report is based on a global survey conducted by market research firm Illuminas on behalf of Broadcom. The survey was fielded from March 6 to April 4, 2025, and included 1,800 senior IT decision-makers across small, medium-sized, and large enterprises in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Respondents represented sectors such as financial services, government, healthcare, insurance, and pharmaceuticals.

The Latest

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...