Shift Right: Evolving from On-Premise to Private Cloud

By Mike Hoy, CTO at Pulsant

Pulsant explores the path organisations are taking toward hybrid-cloud environments, highlighting how the private cloud can unlock significant advantages over traditional on-premise infrastructure and play a vital role in accelerating digital transformation.

A company’s approach to cloud adoption often hinges on where its data originates, where it resides, and how it is utilised.

This gives rise to a clear spectrum of infrastructure ownership:

At one extreme sits the on-premise model, where an organisation manages and maintains its own IT infrastructure within its own facilities, using its own hardware and resources.

Just beyond this is colocation. Here, the business still owns and operates its equipment but rents physical space within a third-party data centre, gaining benefits like improved connectivity and power resilience without relinquishing control of the systems themselves.

A further step along is the private cloud, where a service provider delivers infrastructure and services exclusively to a single business. While still dedicated, it offers scalability and flexibility without the need for direct hardware management.

At the far end of the spectrum is a public cloud, where multiple customers share resources hosted by a third-party provider, typically accessed via the public internet. Many organisations begin their cloud journey from a traditional on-premise base. This decision point often arises either from the need to overcome legacy infrastructure constraints or as part of a natural hardware lifecycle refresh.

This shift offers not just technical benefits but financial ones, too, moving from large-scale capital investments (capex) to more predictable and scalable operational expenses (opex). Yet, cost-saving isn’t the only consideration. Aligning IT spending with actual service delivery and business outcomes is often just as important.

Several key factors influence how and where workloads are placed along this spectrum: regulatory compliance, system resilience, cybersecurity, data privacy, energy efficiency, and cost control are among the most significant.

Why Shift Right?

Right now, data sovereignty sits at the forefront of compliance conversations. In the UK, it’s governed by the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). Sectors like finance and healthcare face even stricter requirements.

In reality, much of this regulation requires organisations to ensure that UK data is stored and transmitted within UK borders—and to have clear, auditable evidence of doing so. Sovereign private clouds, hosted within national boundaries, have become a vital tool for compliance.

Closely linked to compliance is resilience. Many businesses turn away from on-premise setups after encountering outages or downtime that their internal systems couldn’t handle. Building redundant infrastructure internally is costly and complex. Maintaining duplicate servers, networks, power, and skilled personnel soon becomes a major drain on resources. This makes handing off those responsibilities to a private cloud partner a compelling choice.

Security and privacy concerns further drive this evolution. Running a secure on-premise environment, complete with up-to-date defences and monitoring, is resource-intensive. Partnering with a specialist cloud provider helps de-risk these challenges.

That partnership approach also brings gains in efficiency, sustainability, and cost. Private cloud providers can invest in modern, energy-efficient infrastructure at scale—passing the benefits onto clients. This not only supports greener operations but also enhances an organisation’s sustainability credentials.

Pulsant’s Private Cloud (PPC) offers a robust, UK-based sovereign cloud solution that empowers businesses to embrace this shift. Built on our own network of data centres and our high-speed 400Gb national network, PPC connects customers to a secure, compliant, and scalable infrastructure—with private links to public cloud providers and access to a broad digital ecosystem.

As businesses adapt to a data-led world, PPC helps ensure they remain compliant, resilient, secure, and future-ready.