Such offerings underscore an industry truth: The frontier of enterprise computing has expanded beyond the walls of the private data center. It now lives in the highly elastic, geographically dispersed infrastructure of public clouds and cloudlike networks. These are environments where capacity can scale up by orders of magnitude on demand, where new services (from serverless functions to AI APIs) launch weekly, and where economies of scale drive down the cost of experimentation.
Private cloud’s future
None of this is to suggest that private clouds are obsolete—far from it. Large enterprises will maintain significant on-premises footprints for the foreseeable future, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. The enterprise IT landscape in 2025 is undeniably hybrid and likely always will be. But it’s equally undeniable that the center of gravity for innovation has shifted. When a new opportunity emerges—say, deploying a breakthrough AI model or scaling a customer-facing app to millions of users overnight—companies aren’t spinning up a new on-premises cluster to meet the moment. They’re tapping the virtually unlimited resources of AWS, Azure, Google, or edge networks like Cloudflare. They’re doing so because cloud offers experimentation without hardware procurement, and success isn’t gated by how many servers you happen to own.
Private clouds excel at running the known and steady. Public clouds excel at unleashing the unknown and extraordinary. As we reach a cloud/on-prem equilibrium, this division of labor is becoming clearer. The day-to-day workloads that keep the business running may happily live in a familiar private cloud enclave. But the industry-defining projects, the ones leaders hope will define the business’s future, gravitate to infrastructure that can stretch to any size, in any region, at a moment’s notice. In the cloud era, elasticity is the mother of invention, and that’s one mother most on-premises setups simply lack.