The ripple effect of U.S. political decisions is impacting global markets, trade, and sentiment across the world. But is it starting to influence the UK cloud market?
Every year, we publish our Mid-Market report on the UK Cloud market, conducted via an independent research consultant, Censuswide. This survey involves over 300 UK companies and uses a standard set of questions to benchmark changing market sentiment, which informs our strategy.
We received the results for the 2025 survey last week, and one question’s results shocked us. While we haven’t published the full report yet, I want to provide a sneak preview.
Is your organisation planning to migrate any applications or workloads from the public cloud to the private cloud, on-premises, or colocation services in the next 12 months?
In previous years, around 50% of respondents answered “Yes”, citing Technical Complexity and Costs as the main reasons. This year, the answer was a whopping 97% “Yes” with Data Sovereignty and Risk Management being among the top three reasons. You’ll have to wait for the full report to see the details.
Is this the Trump effect? Given the timing of this survey during a period of significant change, and that US companies provide most Public Cloud services, you could certainly draw that conclusion. Even if it is only sharpening the focus on previous concerns, such as DORA and the US Cloud Act.
Are we seeing this on the ground?
Node4 is in a privileged position. We are a significant Microsoft Partner and the owner, operator of four UK data centres. We haven’t seen to date any slowdown in clients’ desire to modernise applications into Microsoft Cloud services, with substantial demand for Dynamics 365, Fabric, Power Platform, and Copilot. However, we have also seen a lot of pragmatism in lift-and-shift migrations from on-prem server infrastructure, typically landing in one of our data centers on a platform such as Azure Local or Virtual Data Centre in combination with co-location. This is usually due to technical complexities, undepreciated hardware, and ease of migration.
It will be interesting to see how the impact of US policy changes pans out over the coming months. Certainly, at Node4, we haven’t seen a swing in buying habits yet, at least in our customer base, but our survey results indicate sentiment has shifted. Whether that translates into reality is something we will be keeping a close eye on.
Read more
Rise of Local Cloud.
Market First for Node4 as it launches revolutionary Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution
