AI continues to seduce business leaders, with seven in ten CIOs locking their sights on private cloud
As the hype around public cloud dies down, many CIOs realise they’ve been lured in by promises that haven’t been delivered. After living with the reality of ‘bill shock’ and complexity, the majority are now beating a path back to the security, predictable costs and less complex environments offered by private cloud. Discontent has been building over several years but now AI is moving beyond pilots to live services, CIOs realise public cloud falls short on the cost, compliance and security requirements that only private AI can deliver. The love affair with private cloud is well beyond the honeymoon phase, it’s become a long-term strategy in the age of AI.
At Xtravirt, we find a combination of cost and operational concerns are driving up interest among the organisations we partner with on their private cloud deployments through our long-term relationship with Broadcom and its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.
Organisations want to tap into our expertise to build an all-in-one platform that has security built in (not bolted on afterwards) and offers predictable costs. They want to develop talent across a platform rather than have a bunch of experts working in isolation across an ecosystem of siloes. As often as not, our VCF work is part of a wider hybrid strategy that requires deep knowledge, gained from our many years of work developing unified private cloud environments, to help deliver a strategy that gives clients the optimal balance of cost, control and performance.
It’s not just our clients telling us that private cloud is now playing more of an integral part of their strategies, it’s evident across the whole IT industry. In the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 research report, more than nine in ten CIOs (93%) reveal they are balancing a mix of public and private clouds and that their top three-year priority is building new workloads in private clouds. Hence, the research found seven in ten (69%) CIOs are considering repatriating public cloud workloads to the private cloud. Their top three concerns with the public cloud are revealed as security, integrating legacy software and cost.
Some of these factors, particularly cost and security, are concerns shared with C-suite colleagues. However, the CIO stands alone as the person with overarching responsibility to make sure new capabilities, and those being repatriated, tick the infrastructure 3 Cs checklist of cost, complexity and compliance. This is why so many are now voting with their feet and moving to private cloud. With predictable costs and a fully integrated private cloud platform like VCF – unifying compute, storage and networking in a way traditional virtualisation software has never achieved – CIOs gain one automated, consistent platform that simplifies operations and accelerates the delivery of secure, scalable digital services.
Private AI prompts a rethink
This has been true for several years but now there’s a new capability heightening interest in private cloud – AI. The CEO, and the wider C-suite, may not know the ins and outs of the technology but they understand it’s a game changer. They want to position their organisation as a leader in working more efficiently with greater market insight, and it’s down to the CIO to make it happen.
The trouble is, they know how AI poses a new risk for sensitive data leakage. Public cloud has been fine for early experimentation and pilots, but now organisations are looking to roll out live AI services. This makes the control and security offered by private AI, as it is now being called, far more appealing. This is why adding private AI to VCF has meant the platform, set up and maintained by our experts, is proving a hugely popular option for our clients.
Often the decision to opt for private cloud with AI is the culmination of the past few years where many CIOs have had separate strategies for front office, back office and data. It has left many back-office workloads in the public cloud, while data has remained protected in a separate data centre. This split strategy is not ideal when there are data leakage and compliance issues to deal with, hence the attraction of private AI.
Three of the top public cloud challenges
of organisations cited security risks as the #1 challenge with public cloud adoption.
of IT leaders believe some of their public cloud spend is wasted.
report difficulties integrating public cloud applications with existing legacy systems.
Tackling cloud complexity
In the background to this AI revolution, there is an equally essential task CIOs must rise to. Although it will likely not catch the eye of the C-suite quite as much, tackling complexity is just as pressing an issue.
The rush to the public cloud, has left many CIOs confronted with patchy infrastructure which has had multiple layers of software added. The initial hope was the organisation was taking a best of breed approach, but the reality is disconnection and confusion, particularly whenever updates are due. CIOs are left with the equivalent of an old jewellery box where strands of heirlooms are wrapped so tightly round each other, they’re hard to separate.
It’s this need to master complexity that is driving many to investigate a unified private cloud platform, such as Broadcom’s VCF. The company’s CTO Joe Baguley firmly believes that VCF can help businesses benefit from taking the complexity out of their IT infrastructures by deploying VCF as an all-in-one, secure platform which takes away the confusion of working with multiple vendors.
“Many organisations are like a taxi company which buys a fleet of Mercedes because that’s the sensible choice,” he says. “They then say they like the gearboxes from Audi and so fit those. They also want the speed of Ferrari, so rip out some of the engines, and replace them. It leaves the organisation with a mess. When things need patching or improving, who do they go to? They can’t go back to Mercedes to fix an Audi gearbox, so they’re stuck.”
It’s a good analogy and it’s why CIOs are now favouring complete platforms and developing platform teams to avoid having siloes of competence across multiple tech stacks.
To cut through growing IT complexity, organisations are turning to unified private cloud platforms like Broadcom’s VCF.
CTO EMEA, Broadcom
Long term partners
We’re finding increasingly that these complex environments are not just leading to CIOs wanting to investigate a single private platform, it is also bringing discussions of road maps to the fore. Potential purchasers want to know their unified private cloud deployment will not only work well today, but there is also a vision of the future they can be reassured by. That’s what we find makes Broadcom’s VCF platform attractive to clients. They know VMware has been a pioneer for many years and now, under Broadcom ownership, it is on the front foot around announcing when new versions of VCF are going to be launched and with which new features. The company has invested a billion dollars in VCF 9, the latest upgrade to its unified private cloud platform, more than most customers will ever spend in R&D across the entire lifetime of their organisation.
This forward-looking vision is reassuring to CIOs, who we normally find take two approaches to platform investments. Some are completely up to speed on every latest tech advancement and know exactly what they want. Many others have an idea of what they need but are cautious and want flexibility in case things change. Either way, both approaches benefit from working in partnership with a specialist services partner like Xtravirt. With our knowledge and expertise, CIOs have greater confidence when investing in private cloud, knowing it will be able to deliver for the business today, as well as evolve to meet future needs.
In our experience, organisations rarely require every VCF function enabled from day one. Instead, they benefit from following a defined roadmap that helps them unlock additional features, and greater value, in an order that aligns with their priorities. We work closely with them to design that roadmap and ensure they achieve continuous value realisation from the platform.
If there is one thing guiding CIOs today, it is this ability to deliver today in a way that does not constrain capabilities further down the line. Now that so many realise the limitations of the public cloud, they are opting for greater control over cost, compliance and complexity, and AI is proving the perfect catalyst for change. And so, the deepening relationship with VCF continues.
