The public versus private cloud question is usually argued at the wrong altitude. It gets framed as a philosophical choice when it is really a set of practical trade-offs with clear answers once you know your own workload.
Here is how we think about it, including the cases where we would tell you to use a hyperscaler instead of us.
What public cloud is genuinely better at
- Spiky, unpredictable demand. If your load can go up tenfold for three days and then back down, elastic capacity you can release is worth paying a premium for.
- Managed services you would otherwise build. Queues, serverless functions, managed Kubernetes, large-scale analytics and machine learning platforms represent an enormous amount of engineering you get to skip.
- Global reach. If your users are spread across continents, so should your infrastructure be.
- Starting from zero. Nothing beats a credit card and twenty minutes while you are still proving an idea.
What a private or dedicated environment is better at
- Steady, predictable workloads. An ERP, an accounting system or a file server has a shape that barely changes month to month. Elasticity you never use is a premium paid for nothing.
- Cost you can forecast. A fixed monthly figure is easier to budget, approve and explain than a bill assembled from per-request, per-gigabyte and egress charges.
- Data residency you can point at. Not a region setting, but a named facility in the country.
- Software never designed for cloud. Plenty of valuable business software expects a Windows server, a local SQL instance and a stable address. Making it cloud-native is often a project with no business case.
- Latency to local users. For a team in Johannesburg working in a desktop application all day, a server in Durban beats a server in Ireland and it is not close.
- One phone number. When something breaks at month end, the difference between a support ticket and a person who knows your environment is the whole thing.
The questions that usually settle it
Rather than comparing architectures, answer these:
- Does your load vary by more than about three times across a normal month? If yes, elasticity is worth real money. If no, you are renting an option you never exercise.
- Can you say what next month’s bill will be, to within ten percent? If not, that is a finance problem as much as a technical one.
- Where are the people who use this system daily, and are they in a browser or a desktop application?
- If a regulator or a client asked where this data physically sits, could you answer with a building?
- When it breaks, who fixes it, and is that person on your team?
Most businesses end up with both
This is not a loyalty test. A common and sensible shape is the steady core, your accounting system, file services and internal applications, in a predictable local environment, with public cloud used for what it is genuinely better at. Microsoft 365 for productivity, a hyperscaler for a customer-facing application that has to scale, and a local VPS for the systems your finance team lives in.
What matters is that each workload sits where it belongs for a reason you can state out loud.
If you want a straight answer about your own environment, tell us what you are running. If the answer is that you should stay where you are, we will say so.