INTHEBLACK November 2026 - Magazine - Page 26
FEATURE
Organisations are reassessing
cloud data storage as costs,
sovereignty and control
become bigger concerns.
Hybrid and on-premise
options may suit stable,
sensitive or data-heavy
organisational workloads.
The right model depends
on a number of factors,
including the size and
scale of the organisation.
Is the cloud
losing
Should organisations choose cloud,
on-premise or hybrid data-storage
infrastructure? That is the question
many businesses around the world
are asking as they deal with a growing
array of information challenges.
Words Tony Kaye
THE GLOBAL COMPUTING
ecosystem is continuing to expand and evolve
at an unprecedented pace, forcing many
organisations to reassess their information
technology infrastructure requirements.
As organisations adopt AI tools and
data-intensive systems, they are generating,
analysing and retaining more information
than ever before. At the same time, many
are seeking greater control over how that
data is stored, secured and governed.
There are also financial decisions to
be made, shaped by the potentially high
costs of storing data in the public cloud
(one owned and managed by an external party,
for example Google Cloud) and accessing
26 INTHEBLACK November 2026
it over time. Storing digital assets off-site at
third-party-owned and operated data centres
has long been used as the go-to, default solution.
However, increasingly, many organisations are
looking beyond the public cloud.
Dr Nicola Sfondrini, partner, cloud
infrastructure at PwC Italy, explains that
when entities were deciding where to run
applications and workloads 10 years ago,
the first question was often whether they
should use the cloud.
“Cloud economics has traditionally been
built around a relatively simple assumption:
that organisations should seek the best
combination of performance, scalability
and cost,” Sfondrini says. He points out
