Welcome to Cloud Week 2025!

Legacy platforms are outdated, costly, and hard to integrate. To make lasting progress, many forces are turning to cloud-native technology—not just cloud-hosted systems—as the foundation for sustainable transformation.

Modernising requires more than a lift-and-shift approach; a well-architected strategy grounded in best practice is crucial. 

This 2025 research gathered the thoughts and predictions of more than 750 senior leaders, based in Europe and the US, to understand what the current barriers to success are and how the European landscape is shifting.

This blog will explore some of the key opportunities and challenges facing the public sector ahead of DSIT’s upcoming and landmark cloud strategy.

ANS's Ant Holland outlines 7 key steps to a successful cloud migration strategy

With the right combination of design patterns, cloud-native technologies, and operational efficacy, enterprises can scale intelligently and sustainably, turning their cloud infrastructure into a true enabler of business growth and innovation.

This isn’t just a product update – it’s a strategic shift that redefines what sovereignty means in the cloud era and signals a new chapter for digital innovation in Europe. 

Security in the cloud is a transformation of control. Physical barriers have been replaced with Zero Trust architectures, Identity and Access Management, and security policies as code. But capabilities alone do not guarantee the right security outcomes.   

A strategic guide exists for implementing digital sovereignty in defence cloud systems. However, the UK defence currently operates in the cloud environment without any ongoing discussion about its use. If digital sovereignty is the key, then ongoing discussion and improvement is crucial.

While the UK has clearly established regulations on sovereign cloud, the geopolitical situation is currently unstable, and AI technology continues to develop rapidly. As a result, the responsibility to protect data falls on providers and organisations.

Brute force is basic, and rainbow attacks are old hat. When you can slip in through a trusted partner, capture a token, or simply get that Oauth app you've been working on in someone’s environment, it’s easy to stroll on in through the front door. 

In the digital world, cybersecurity is no longer a technical afterthought, it is a defining factor in organisational survival. The stakes have never been higher. Threat actors are sophisticated, borders are blurred, and dependency on complex digital ecosystems leaves little margin for error.

Organisations are accelerating their cloud journeys in pursuit of agility, scalability, and innovation. At the same time, a critical challenge often goes unnoticed and risks undermining the investment in cloud modernisation: the visibility gaps that compromise security and performance.

We are living in interesting and unpredictable times where the technical and security assumptions of the last 15 years of digital service delivery planning are no longer valid, needing to be accurately and carefully reviewed in light of our landscape as a nation.

As cloud computing becomes increasingly integral to how organisations store, process and derive value from data, the issue of digital sovereignty is more salient than ever.

Increasingly, UK public sector faces a multi-cloud problem. This diversity is unavoidable but hinders innovation, leaving data in silos that block secure, joined up services.

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is emerging as the next evolution of cloud, promising to transform the way we design, deploy, and manage connectivity and security. 

Although the term multi-cloud has been around for more than a decade, it’s only in the last couple of years that interest in this approach has really taken off (driven in part by concerns around major security incidents, as well as regulatory concerns).

As enterprises deepen their reliance on public cloud services, many are now considering what their ‘lifeboat’ options would be in the event of a fundamental cloud compromise.

Ben Blanquera shares strategies for effectively capitalising on the full potential of hybrid cloud.

The UK tech sector stands at a unique inflection point. We have the cloud infrastructure expertise, the research excellence, and – crucially – the regulatory wisdom to lead a different vision.

Elm’s real-world deployments offer practical insights into what’s possible when these technologies are localized, secure, and designed with people in mind.

Richard Beck raises the alarm on the unique security risks posed by AI, and why we need a new approach to detect threats hiding under the radar of legacy frameworks.

Private cloud is gaining renewed relevance as AI workloads scale and data sovereignty becomes a priority, prompting MSPs to evolve into strategic partners.

Our mission is clear: to power the growth of AI innovation across the region by offering a purpose-built cloud, powered by the latest AI infrastructure, and designed for the most demanding AI workloads across enterprises, startups and research organisations. 

Becoming data-driven is a continuous journey, not a one-time project. Sustained success requires regularly reassessing maturity, evolving governance, and refining practices to address new challenges and opportunities. 

For all the hype around artificial intelligence, the real bottleneck isn’t algorithms. It’s data. High-quality, diverse, and ethically sourced data is the fuel AI runs on. That’s where synthetic data and cloud infrastructure intersect, and why the UK has a chance to lead in this space. 

If sustainability is the goal, then the cloud must be understood not as the solution but as an enabler.

Understanding AI’s footprint is crucial, yet thorough data on the energy and environmental impact of AI inference — the use of a trained AI model to make predictions or generate text or images — has been limited.

As the sector evolves, cloud solutions are set to play a pivotal role in achieving industry goals and advancing the clean energy transition.

Emissions data is often what’s holding us back from more sustainable approaches to cloud use; it’s often incomplete, it’s not granular, and its primarily retrospective, making it difficult, as users of those services, to know what to do.

GreenOps means maximising the value of your cloud provisions for sustainability as well as typical considerations like performance, security, and cost.

Cloud has the potential to support a more sustainable digital economy, but organisations should see it as the foundation for sustainable best practice and not a panacea.