For well over a decade, organisations pinned their digital transformation efforts on cloud adoption. The solution to the siloing, complexity and high costs of on-premises infrastructure, cloud was supposed to usher in far greater agility, innovation and efficiency. Yet, as our team regularly encounters, for many, these benefits haven’t lived up to expectations.
Why? Because your cloud and its success isn’t down to the provider or platform – it’s how you run it.
Below, learn how the cloud calculus has changed in favour of an operating model approach – particularly for large, regulated organisations. Your cloud should deliver the outcomes you need – here’s how.
See what your cloud operating model could look like and the transformation it could enable.
Cloud adopters face an array of challenges
Early cloud adoption focused on migrating on-premises workloads to cloud platforms to unlock a simpler, cheaper, more flexible solution compared to traditional IT.
Organisations were encouraged to adopt a specific – often public – cloud platform; a popular hyperscaler service from a big name with all the bells and whistles. These options offered excellent flexibility, low upfront costs, and all the connectivity and collaboration benefits. But over time, these public platforms have brought their own challenges.
A global survey of IT professionals by Dimensional Research found that, in late 2024:
- 69% lacked end-to-end visibility of their cloud estate, inviting anxieties around security and data sovereignty.
- 79% were caught off-guard by rising costs as pay-as-you-go pricing met uncontrolled consumption and growing data volumes.
- 83% suffered from maintenance delays due to a lack of collaboration between internal and external cloud teams.
- 96% experienced the negative effects of poor network performance, reducing the efficiency benefits cloud was supposed to introduce.
These challenges are pressing, but there’s another crucial strategic issue at play: a single hyperscaler cloud environment can rarely replicate the systems it’s meant to replace. Your organisation’s functions aren’t simple or uniform, so over time, your cloud estate grows and can become complex.
Today, 73% of global organisations operate hybrid cloud estates, but doing so isn’t plain sailing. Many report problems managing costs, security, licensing, compliance, and a lack of expertise and resources.
Alarmingly, it’s not just some hybrid cloud users that encounter these issues: according to one SAS survey, 99% experience them.
By 2027, Gartner forecasts the 73% of companies operating multiple clouds will rise to 90%. To avoid challenges being experienced en masse, organisations need to adapt. Infrastructure decisions need to balance a web of considerations: cost, performance, governance, regulatory compliance, and operational complexity.
Navigating these considerations requires a cloud strategy that drives your architectural and operational choices; a much tougher task than simply picking a platform. For regulated organisations wishing to move to the cloud or improve their cloud strategy, opting for private cloud could be the answer.
Critical infrastructure relies on private cloud
Private cloud has long been a smart choice for organisations in regulated sectors like public services, finance, healthcare, and telecommunications. These companies need reliable cloud capabilities with the right mix of benefits:
- Security, privacy and compliance: Sovereign cloud prevents data from being shared with third parties or foreign governments, reducing the risk of security breaches and ensuring compliance with strict regulatory requirements and data sovereignty laws.
- Control and customisation: Dedicated infrastructure provides full control over hardware and software, allowing configurations precisely tailored to business needs.
- Cost efficiency: Compared to public cloud, private cloud can be more cost-effective for predictable, high-volume, long-term workloads.
- Legacy support: Private cloud can host older applications that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to migrate to public cloud.
- Performance and reliability: Dedicated resources prevent performance bottlenecks ensuring high availability.
So, if private cloud is the answer, then why aren’t more regulated organisations using it? Often, it comes down to perception. Private cloud is seen as more expensive, complex to manage and slower to deploy than public cloud. In reality, many of these concerns fall away when organisations prioritise workload suitability and cloud fit first.
If organisations can focus on the overarching operating model, and effectively organise their IT prior, during, and after private cloud adoption, upfront costs are reduced, systems are cheaper to operate, and resources can be allocated to users efficiently. And if some workloads exist on public cloud, the operating model accounts for that too with a smartly organised hybrid approach.
Private cloud isn’t about rejecting public cloud. It’s about recognising that different workloads require different environments. What matters most is having the right operating model to manage those environments effectively.
– Darren Adcock, Senior Product Manager, Redcentric
What can we learn from successful private cloud operating models?
A private cloud that stands the test of time is built on a firm foundation that can adapt to change:
The correct underlying network
Cloud performance and manageability are heavily influenced by your underlying network. If your organisation operates across multiple environments, the network plays a critical role in enabling reliable connectivity, consistent application performance, secure data and service access, and the proper enforcement of security and compliance policies.
As such, network design is a key focus area. Running a private cloud effectively requires a broader infrastructure view, where network and cloud work together as part of a unified environment.
Governance models
Any successful workflow needs guardrails to safeguard its use. The problem is, many traditional governance frameworks are manual and approval driven. This slows down access, drives up costs, and can lead to problems with compliance. Some users ace it, while others simply ignore it.
By defining policies, automating them and simplifying user identification so the cloud becomes self-service, governance is embedded in how your organisation works.
Operational responsibility
If there are question marks over which individuals or teams own specific parts of your cloud estate, confusion will eat away at your operations leading to avoidable costs. Instead, clearly designate who owns what, feeding this into the overall operating model and ensuring enforcement via automation and audits.
For instance, a platform team might own the foundation of the private cloud, while teams responsible for different functions own public cloud services they use to perform their own applications.
Lifecycle management
Without a well-designed approach to patching, upgrades and capacity planning, your cloud systems will accrue technical debt that increases the risk of downtime.
Instead, lifecycle management should be disciplined: repeatable, traceable, and standardised across your organisation. That way, your cloud environment can adapt to change in the most efficient way possible.
Resilience and continuity
Any forward-thinking organisation should have a disaster recovery plan in place for its cloud-based services, but the very best of them engineer resilience into their platform.
That means protecting and backing up each layer of the platform, regularly testing recovery scenarios, and ensuring the cloud operations are observable and traceable. That way, if the worst happens, a well-thought out solution can snap into action.
Integration across multiple platforms
Your private cloud architecture should seamlessly integrate with your public cloud, non-cloud systems, financial operations and security systems.
For this to happen, things like a consistent user experience, identification, security and networking, should be put in place across environments. That way, platforms predictably work alongside one another.
Redcentric Cloud enables this operating model
All these focus areas are key, but for many regulated organisations, limited internal resources and skills mean the full benefits are left out of reach. That’s where managed private cloud providers come in.
Managed service providers are nothing new in the industry – in 2025 Flexera reported that 60% of large organisations used one. But not all MSPs are alike. We can help you design and operate a controllable, flexible, predictable and compliant solution to whatever form your organisational complexity takes.
Redcentric Cloud gives you the infrastructure and operational support you need to design and implement a modern and lasting cloud strategy. Our experts work with you to create a bespoke solution that aligns with your regulatory and governance requirements.
Delivered from secure UK infrastructure and supported by expert managed services, Redcentric Cloud lets you combine your organisation’s complex and evolving cloud environments into a simple, efficient package. Get in touch today and find out how we can help you find the private cloud that best fits your cloud strategy.
