At a Glance
Public cloud environments can become costly and restrictive as businesses scale. Key issues include rising expenses, vendor lock-in, shared security risks, performance issues from noisy neighbours, and limited customisation. These challenges signal the need to migrate to private cloud infrastructure for stability, control, and long-term efficiency.
Cloud Adoption in the UK
In the last decade, UK businesses have adopted the cloud with great enthusiasm. Public cloud environments come with an assurance of high speeds, performance, and great flexibility without the heavy investments of owning infrastructure. Naturally, businesses often prefer them over seemingly expensive private clouds.
Although it can be a great starting point for a business to move to a cloud ecosystem, many organisations eventually find that public clouds impose limits on efficiency, scalability, and workload performance.
If your business is experiencing these pain points, it may be an indication that you’ve outgrown the public cloud and need to migrate to private cloud infrastructure. In this guide, we highlight the 5 key signs that indicate the time is right for a public cloud to private cloud migration.
Why UK Businesses are Repatriating from Public Cloud
The momentum of businesses moving data, applications, and other business systems to the public cloud computing environment has picked up in the last few years. Public cloud giants like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services were among the clear first choices, driven by the promise of cost savings, scalability, flexibility, and access to advanced technologies.
However, businesses slowly began to realise that public cloud infrastructure is no longer delivering the expected benefits and are considering public cloud repatriation.
In this context, public cloud repatriation refers to the process of migrating to a private cloud, either on-premises or to a colocation provider, from a public cloud. This sentiment is backed by a 2024 CIO survey by Barkley, which highlights that a whopping 83% of enterprises plan to move their workloads back to private clouds.
But how do you know if your business has outgrown the public cloud infrastructure?
5 Clear Signs You’ve Outgrown The Public Cloud
1. Unpredictable Costs & Maintenance
Soaring bills and maintenance costs that are often difficult to predict are a telltale sign that your current cloud setup is becoming financially unviable. Public clouds feel budget-friendly for startups and small to mid-sized businesses at the start, but as you scale up and your workloads increase, cloud expenses can quickly spiral out of control.
Usage-based pricing, data transfer charges and additional storage fees charged by public cloud hosts can quickly inflate your cloud budgets. Growing businesses need the predictability and assurance of private cloud hosts, like BlackBox Hosting, that offer transparent, predictable pricing, with zero surprises.
2. Vendor Lock-In Challenges
Public clouds offer services, technologies, and infrastructure which simplify managing business workloads. Often, these systems are not easily transferable or compatible with other platforms, and migrating workloads to another provider requires time-consuming redevelopment, testing, and operational changes.
If this sounds like something your business is going through, you may be facing a vendor lock-in. Don’t feel trapped by your dependence on the public cloud ecosystem, and migrate to the private cloud for both freedom and flexibility.
3. Security Concerns
Although public clouds have security measures in place, they share infrastructure with other tenants. This can become a major security concern for businesses in regulated industries handling sensitive data, including financial institutions and healthcare providers.
For these organisations, sharing resources with other tenants can increase the risk of data breaches or unauthorised access. If your business needs stricter data governance, you may want to migrate to a private cloud infrastructure that offers you complete control over where and how your data is stored with customisable security measures.
At BlackBox Hosting, we protect your business from every possible threat. From ultra-secure next-gen layered security to full DDoS and ransomware protection, we offer the complete security package; ideal for businesses handling sensitive information.
4. Noisy Neighbour Problem
If your business operations have been experiencing interruptions or slower response times, it may be due to the ‘noisy neighbour problem’. Public clouds are often multi-tenant environments, where multiple clients share the same CPU, memory and bandwidth. One tenant with higher workloads overusing shared resources can affect the performance of the other tenants.
The noisy neighbour problem leads to slower response times, increased latency periods, and even service unavailability for others. The best way to avoid this is to switch to a dedicated infrastructure such as a managed private cloud. Contrary to popular perception, private clouds, like those operated by BlackBox Hosting, are far more cost-effective than popular public clouds.
Our servers have been benchmarked against popular public cloud servers for speed, performance and costs. Check the 2025 benchmark comparison of BlackBox Hosting vs AWS, and vs Azure.
5. Low Customisation
At a certain point, public clouds may fall short if your business has specific requirements that demand highly customised infrastructure.
A shared cloud environment offers limited control when you’re looking to establish specific configurations or data management protocols. You may have to follow standardised configuration protocols set by the public cloud host, limiting the scope of customisations.
If your business needs a tailored IT infrastructure, this lack of control can limit your ability to create unique workflows or meet regulatory needs.
Migrating from public cloud to private cloud doesn’t mean rejecting the public cloud itself. Instead, it points to businesses reassessing and refining their cloud strategies.
Shift to BlackBox Hosting’s Private Cloud Infrastructure
BlackBox Hosting is among the leading private cloud providers in the UK, supporting big and small businesses with secure, reliable, and customisable private cloud infrastructure. With a 99.999% network uptime guarantee, a customer-centric approach, and robust UK sovereign infrastructure, we’re not just another cloud provider; we’re a technical partner that supports your business every step of the way.
Making migration to our private cloud infrastructure easy is our migration assistance. Count on our team of cloud engineers, along with our UK-based 24/7 support team, to guide you through a smooth and hassle-free public cloud to private cloud migration process.
Every month in the wrong cloud can cost you in budget, performance and control. Don’t wait; contact us today to make the shift.
