Research commissioned by colocation and connectivity provider Pulsant and carried out by Vanson Bourne shows that 87% of organisations plan to move partially or fully away from public cloud within two years — a figure that illustrates how comprehensively the cloud-first consensus has fractured.
The data, released this week, breaks down into two distinct camps: 54% of businesses reconsidering their infrastructure are evaluating hybrid models built around private cloud, while 38% are shifting workload back into their own data centres. Neither group is abandoning hyperscale entirely, but the calculation has changed.
For much of the past decade the enterprise IT question was how fast to migrate, not whether to. Public cloud promised elastic scale, reduced capital expense, and freedom from the operational weight of on-premises infrastructure. Those promises held for many workloads. They didn't hold universally, and the past two years of AI build-out, tightening data sovereignty regulation across the UK and EU, and the rising cost of egress have collectively eroded the assumption that hyperscale is always the right answer.
Pulsant's analysis frames what's happening as a move from cloud-first to workload-first. The question is no longer which environment the organisation uses, but which workloads fit which environment. Latency-sensitive applications are moving toward the edge. AI inference workloads are gravitating to regional infrastructure where data doesn't need to cross jurisdictions. Large-scale training remains in hyperscale. Stable, predictable workloads are under review for private cloud or colocation, where the economics improve as volume grows.
The sovereignty angle is the least-understood driver. True data sovereignty extends well beyond geography: it includes jurisdiction, legal access rights, the governance frameworks governing how data moves between interconnected systems, and contractual visibility into where data sits at any given moment. EU organisations operating under GDPR, and UK firms navigating post-Brexit data-adequacy arrangements, are finding that public cloud contracts don't always give them the certainty they need.
Regional data centres are emerging as a structural component of the answer. Modern colocation facilities connect directly into hyperscale platforms, enterprise networks, and SaaS ecosystems, acting as digital exchange points that let organisations retain local control while preserving access to global cloud services. The model reduces dependency on any single provider without sacrificing flexibility.
The broader implication is that hybrid has shifted from compromise to default. The organisation that still has a cloud-first mandate written into its IT strategy may find it needs updating. The infrastructure conversation has moved on.
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