<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:googleplay="http://www.google.com/schemas/play-podcasts/1.0"><channel><title><![CDATA[Vishal's Substack]]></title><description><![CDATA[My personal Substack around cybersecurity and technology. ]]></description><link>https://vishalvashisht.substack.com</link><image><url>https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H4Cd!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe9147969-48a5-4eb8-8543-09cd208e4a37_57x57.png</url><title>Vishal&apos;s Substack</title><link>https://vishalvashisht.substack.com</link></image><generator>Substack</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:12:31 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><copyright><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></copyright><language><![CDATA[en-gb]]></language><webMaster><![CDATA[vishalvashisht@substack.com]]></webMaster><itunes:owner><itunes:email><![CDATA[vishalvashisht@substack.com]]></itunes:email><itunes:name><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></itunes:name></itunes:owner><itunes:author><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></itunes:author><googleplay:owner><![CDATA[vishalvashisht@substack.com]]></googleplay:owner><googleplay:email><![CDATA[vishalvashisht@substack.com]]></googleplay:email><googleplay:author><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></googleplay:author><itunes:block><![CDATA[Yes]]></itunes:block><item><title><![CDATA[The stars — or the ducks — are aligning. ]]></title><description><![CDATA[The Old Man of the Jungle is getting ready to shine]]></description><link>https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-stars-or-the-ducks-are-aligning</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-stars-or-the-ducks-are-aligning</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:31:28 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" 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srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vTIo!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0edff9c-5044-462d-bbec-83cca6a9c5dd_1408x768.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg role="img" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><title></title><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p>For fifteen years the cloud was sold as inevitable. Now sovereignty law, runaway bills and a steady drip of outages are quietly handing the advantage back to the people who never stopped running the server room.</p><p>There is a particular kind of person who has spent the last decade being told they were a dinosaur. They kept a data centre running. They asked the awkward questions about where the data lived, who would have access to it &amp; who would pay the bills. For their trouble they were ignored as the Old Man of the Jungle &#8212; the wise old orangutan of the server room, all furrowed brow and long memory, who simply didn&#8217;t understand that the future would be IaaS or PaaS. </p><p>It&#8217;s worth remembering what we have lately learned about that animal, orangutangs have been filmed chewing particular leaves and pressing it to their wounds, a deliberate, self-administered medicine. The lesson is blatantly obvious: the old ape of the canopy was cleverer than the young things ever credited; so too the ITOps veteran. We watched workloads migrate skyward to a chorus of overpaid, cheap suited consultants, and we were ignored as budgets that used to buy hardware were quietly redirected into a monthly subscription nobody could quite work out. The ducks are now lining up neatly behind us. Or the stars, if you prefer. Either way, the old orangutan is getting ready to shine, and the people who mocked him are beginning to wonder whether he was right all along. Not that they&#8217;ll admit it &amp; the same consultants who espoused Cloud First will quietly be deleting old LinkedIn Posts &amp; pretending that they are the new experts, even if they have never seen a server, let alone been in a room at 3am lifting a 50kg one into a rack. </p><p>Sovereignty has dragged the board room in to a new reality. Across the EU and the UK, cloud sovereignty has stopped being a worry for compliance officers and become a genuine strategic problem. The uncomfortable truth is that a European company&#8217;s data, sitting in a European data centre, can still be confiscated under foreign law and this has concentrated minds. Sovereignty is no longer about latency or flag-waving. It is about whether you can promise a regulator, a customer or a court that you know precisely where your information lives and exactly who is able to touch it and protect it from foreign headquartered firms being forced by legislation like the US Cloud Act to hand it over. Seeing the M365 account of the Chief Prosecutor for the ICC demonstrated that any firm or government department or NGO is subject to the whims of any insane US President or corrupt judge willing to hand over a Cloud Act demand for even secret company data. </p><p>That leads to the important question of data sovereignty: control of your data means control of who holds it, and crucially which third parties can reach it. In a hyperscaler estate the honest answer is too often &#8220;we&#8217;re not entirely sure&#8221;. Your data sits on infrastructure you do not own, administered by people you have never met, governed by sub-processor lists that change quietly in the small print. We&#8217;ve seen hyperscalers hacked &amp; not knowing that Russian or Chinese forces have been quietly wandering around their networks for months. For a growing number of executives that is no longer something that is &#8220;The IT Departments Problem&#8221; . It is a liability with their signature on it. Ask who could be compelled to hand over a copy of your customer records, and the answer involves a chain of contracts, foreign statutes and acquisition rumours that no single person in the building can read end to end. The moment a board genuinely understands that it cannot answer a simple question &#8212; where is our data, and who can read it without telling us &#8212; the architecture diagram stops being an IT concern and becomes a matter of C Suite survival.</p><p>The regulators have noticed, and they have brought the laws. The EU AI Act, NIS2, GDPR and their national equivalents have made security and data governance genuinely hard to evidence in someone else&#8217;s cloud. NIS2 widens the definition of an essential entity and shoves accountability for security up to board level, with personal consequences attached. The AI Act layers fresh obligations onto how models are trained and where data is allowed to flow. Try demonstrating any of that when your logging, your key management and your entire supply chain belong to a vendor three jurisdictions away. We&#8217;ve seen proprietary data end up on the public internet because someone used ChatGPT. </p><p>And then there is the $, which is about to get worse for reasons that have nothing to do with you. The hyperscalers are pouring hundreds of billions into GPUs and AI capacity, and capital on that scale has to be paid for. It will be paid by you, whether or not you ever asked for a chatbot. Most businesses did not want to subsidise an arms race in inference but they&#8217;ll pay for it anyway, in creeping, unauditable per-unit prices and in features bolted on by default that you&#8217;ll never use <em><strong>cough</strong></em> Co-Pilot <em><strong>cough</strong></em></p><p>Here is what would have been unthinkable in 2018: even with hardware prices elevated, a local data centre, or even a modest company server room is now comfortably cheaper than renting the same capacity by the hour, year after year, in perpetuity. As it has always been, especially if you are not Netflix or Amazon and your data sizes are vaguely static or predictably increasing year on year. The cloud&#8217;s economics were always a wager that someone else&#8217;s margin, stacked on someone else&#8217;s markup, would beat your own depreciation schedule. For steady, predictable workloads that wager has quietly stopped paying off.</p><p>The bigger problem is predictability itself. Cloud spend is very nearly impossible to forecast: a single misconfigured autoscaler, a chatty new feature, a busy month, and the invoice lurches. A box you bought is a box you bought. On-premises hardware can be budgeted to the penny, depreciated cleanly, and cross-charged to the departments that actually use it. And the old trade-off &#8212; that you lost the cloud-native conveniences &#8212; has collapsed. Modern hypervisors give you tenancies, virtual private clouds, and the same self-service comforts, with kubernetes and databases supplied natively by the platform itself. Try estimating how much a SINGLE Azure Virtual Desktop will cost you per month. I did. I couldn&#8217;t. ONE machine. Scale that up to an enterprise of servers, kubernetes, Fargate, WAF, S3 buckets, storage costs, running times, spot pricing, subnet costs, public ip costs, ingress, egress, firewalls, routers, data flows and the multitude of other things that you have to think about. There are over 600 server sku&#8217;s in Azure based on not only size, but also region, location, time of use &amp; a multitude of other random options that even the most tech savvy savant accountant can&#8217;t work out. </p><p>Nowhere is the unpredictability more painful than in the gap between DevOps and the people who pay the bills. A generation of engineers grew up treating infrastructure as essentially someone else&#8217;s problem &amp; it might as well have been literal clouds. Hand someone who has never had to budget for a server a few careless lines of Terraform, and they can leave a fleet of GPU instances running across a long weekend and torch six figures before anyone notices or run up &#163;10,000s of ingress/egress costs because &#8220;no one would ever charge something like that&#8221;. Bringing environments back on premises restores a boundary and more importantly control of the budget. ITOps regains the controls, and it becomes genuinely impossible to run up &#163;100,000s of needless cost through laziness or simple incompetence. </p><p>That same lunacy has a security dimension the industry prefers not to dwell on. Think about the sheer number of times developers have left an S3 bucket publicly readable, or pushed a development API wired, for convenience, to production onto the open internet with no password at all. The cloud did not invent human error. It simply gave it a global blast radius and a public IP address, and then billed for the privilege. A misconfigured permission in a server room is an internal embarrassment; the same mistake in a public cloud is a data breach indexed by search engines like Shodan within the hour. The defaults invited it, the convenience encouraged it, and the audit trail that might have caught it belonged to the very platform on which the leak occurred, which also charges you for the privilege of logging those mistakes. </p><p>None of this means going back to racking pizza boxes and waiting on IT Ops. The on-premises stack has grown up. VMware, Nutanix &amp; OpenShift have matured into proper private-cloud platforms, and they deliver local fully managed and secured Kubernetes that can be packaged with observability and security tooling already baked in. ITOps teams get a platform they can actually secure, with guardrails in place by default rather than bolted on after the breach. The result is less heroics, fewer 3am surprises, and an estate whose blast radius that not only can you can draw on a single whiteboard, but actually be traceable with a list of people you can slap for errors. </p><p>The same logic now reaches AI itself. Running models locally is both more secure and, increasingly, cheaper. Your sensitive data never leaves the building, inference costs become a known and fixed quantity, and you are no longer renting access to a black box whose pricing changes at the vendor&#8217;s whim. The thing the cloud promised would be impossible on your own floor turns out to fit neatly in a rack. You&#8217;re never going to get a $500 million bill for ONE MONTH of token usage.</p><p>Reliability was meant to be the cloud&#8217;s trump card. The reality is a steady drumbeat of outages and a dependence underpaid, overworked first and second line engineers hidden behind an outsourced, offshored call centre whose SLAs depend on not escalating your calls. When Barclays, one of the largest banks on earth, was caught in an Azure outage, it could do precisely nothing but wait for Microsoft to get round to it, at Microsoft&#8217;s convenience and on Microsoft&#8217;s timetable. There is no escalation path that money can buy back the one thing you surrendered: control. The board could field its sharpest engineers, its lawyers and its regulators, and still all of them would be reduced to refreshing a status page that read, with maddening serenity, that the provider was &#8220;aware of the issue&#8221;. When your continuity plan depends on the goodwill and staffing rota of a company that owes you nothing beyond a service credit, you do not have a continuity plan. You have a hope and as anyone who has had to deal with users when there is a Teams outage&#8230;hope is a currency with zero value as you try to explain to them that there is literally NOTHING you can do and regardless of the size of the firm and self perceived importance of the person doing the shouting, they&#8217;ll have to wait. </p><p>That powerlessness is sharpened by the slow decline of hyperscaler customer support. The local, in-country expertise that once came with an enterprise relationship has thinned to a ticket queue and a chatbot. Customers increasingly want to speak to a human being in their own country, in their own time zone, who can be named, reached and held accountable. Not a rotating cast of strangers reading from the same script you have already read yourself that have never seen the product they are &#8220;supporting&#8221; &amp; consistently are there for the sole reason to block your access to actual engineers. Anyone who has called Cisco for support can attest to this&#8230;"send us your logs and we&#8217;ll test it in our labs&#8221; followed by an email 3 weeks later that your ticket has been closed successfully while your switch is physically on fire &amp; your environment is working at 1Mbps rather than the 4Gbps you&#8217;re paying for. </p><p>Then there are the events nobody prices in. The black swan that risk registers quietly omitted is exactly the sort that just happened: two AWS datacentres bombed in the Middle East. Concentrating the world&#8217;s compute into a handful of vast, well-known targets was always a geopolitical bet as much as a technical one &#8212; and bets, eventually, get called. Resilience that depends on the continued peace of a single region is not resilience at all. Distribute your own infrastructure across the buildings, towns and countries that suit you, and no single act &#8212; physical or political &#8212; can take the whole estate down with it. Concentration was sold as efficiency; it turns out to have been fragility wearing efficiency&#8217;s clothes. Your own DC having an issue IS a problem, an expensive one but it is under your control and your timescales to fix it. No one else is impacted and you are not constantly being sent to the back of the fix queue as bigger, more important customers are brought on line before you. </p><p>It is hard not to see the cloud as one of the great emperor&#8217;s-new-clothes moments of our age. The tech and consultancy industries, having long since run out of genuinely new ideas, learned instead to manufacture conviction &#8212; to drape an ordinary outsourcing arrangement in the language of transformation and parade it past the boardroom while everyone nodded admiringly at the magnificent, invisible cloth. To say out loud that the emperor was naked was to be cast as a blocker, someone who simply could not keep up. And so even many ITOps people, who should have known better, did exactly what the courtiers in the story did: they admired the robes. The human brain aches to be part of the crowd, and the crowd was migrating, and dissent was lonely.</p><p>What is most annoying, looking back, is how predictable all of this was. The people in operations said as this years ago, in the few meetings where they dared, before they were politely overruled by a slide deck promising agility, saving and that all important buzzword &#8220;innovation&#8221;. The cloud, for a great many organisations, was a mistake that could have been seen coming and was seen coming, by the very wise old orangutang now being quietly asked to clean it up without mentioning that &#8220;we told you so&#8221;. </p><p>The final duck (meteor? asteroid?)  is about to come crashing down. The EU is moving to make egress charges,  the insane charge that hyperscalers bill you for on your own data as it leaves their cloud effectively illegal. The exit tax that kept so many customers hostage is about to fall to roughly nothing. For everyone who long wanted to leave but could never afford the door, the door is swinging open. Once leaving is free, &#8220;too hard &amp; expensive to migrate&#8221; stops being a strategy and becomes an excuse. The whole commercial logic of the hyperscaler,  $1000 to enter and $10,000 to leave goes straight out the window. When the cost of walking away falls to virtually zero, every renewal becomes a real negotiation and the balance of power shifts back across the table for the first time in a decade.</p><p>On premises vendors have caught up. they  offer funding that lets on-premises be paid as Opex or Capex, whichever suits the balance sheet, which removes the last financial excuse for inertia. Things like a fixed price based on when you bought even though you are adding more storage or compute is now a thing. The old lazy objection that the cloud was simply easier to sign off no longer survives contact with a spreadsheet.</p><p>And once you are on your own floor, the handcuffs come off. There is no lock-in. Moving between hypervisors is straightforward; moving between hardware providers is straightforward. You own the relationship again, which means you own the negotiating power again. The stars, or the ducks, are aligning &#8212; and after a decade in the shade, dismissed as a relic while the courtiers admired cloth that was never there, the wise old orangutang is finally getting ready to sip his coffee.</p><p></p><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe now&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-stars-or-the-ducks-are-aligning?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Share&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-stars-or-the-ducks-are-aligning?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p><div class="directMessage button" data-attrs="{&quot;userId&quot;:352294121,&quot;userName&quot;:&quot;Vishal Vashisht&quot;,&quot;canDm&quot;:null,&quot;dmUpgradeOptions&quot;:null,&quot;isEditorNode&quot;:true}" data-component-name="DirectMessageToDOM"></div><p></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Strategic Advantages of Data Repatriation for European and UK Businesses]]></title><description><![CDATA[Why we need to extract ourselves from Silicon Valley]]></description><link>https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-strategic-advantages-of-data</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-strategic-advantages-of-data</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:34:54 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg 424w, 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srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4dW1!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa83d2964-7ca6-4e4d-a4ee-51f1de2a6428_704x384.jpeg 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg role="img" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><title></title><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p></p><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe now&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p><p></p><ul><li><p><strong>83% of European and UK CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads in 2024, up from 43% in 2020.</strong></p></li><li><p><strong>Up to 32% of cloud spending is wasted or inefficient, driving the shift back to on-premises or European data centres.</strong></p></li><li><p><strong>Repatriation enables compliance with stringent EU data sovereignty laws, including GDPR and the EU Data Governance Act.</strong></p></li><li><p><strong>On-premises and hybrid models offer predictable costs, enhanced security, and greater control over sensitive data.</strong></p></li><li><p><strong>Sustainability and carbon footprint reduction are emerging drivers for localised data storage and processing.</strong></p></li></ul><p>The cloud computing landscape in Europe and the UK is undergoing a profound transformation. While cloud adoption was once heralded as the inevitable future of IT infrastructure, a growing number of enterprises are now reconsidering this approach. The trend of data repatriation&#8212;moving workloads back from hyper-scale public clouds to on- premises or third-party European data centres&#8212;is gaining momentum. This shift is not a rejection of cloud technology but a strategic realignment driven by evolving priorities around data sovereignty, cost efficiency, control, and sustainability. For decision-makers such as CTOs, CIOs, IT directors, and financial controllers, understanding the advantages of repatriation is critical to optimising long-term IT strategy and compliance.</p><h2><strong>The Rising Tide of Data Repatriation</strong></h2><p>The movement toward cloud repatriation is underscored by compelling statistics. According to a 2024 Barclays CIO survey, 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads, a dramatic increase from 43% in late 2020 1. IDC&#8217;s June 2024 report further reveals that about 80% of respondents expect some level of repatriation of compute and storage resources within the next 12 months 1. This trend reflects a maturing cloud strategy where organisations seek to balance the benefits of cloud scalability with the need for greater control and cost predictability.</p><p>The phenomenon of &#8220;cloud waste&#8221; is a significant driver. Flexera&#8217;s 2024 State of the Cloud Report estimates that up to 32% of cloud spending is unused or inefficient, creating a structural cost trap that repatriation or hybrid models can mitigate 2. Companies are increasingly recognising that while cloud services offer flexibility, they often come with unpredictable pricing, egress fees, and hidden costs that erode long-term savings. Repatriation allows organisations to reclaim autonomy over their IT environments and optimise spending.</p><h2><strong>Cost Efficiency: Predictability and Long-Term Savings</strong></h2><p>While cloud services offer scalability, their cost structures often include unpredictable pricing, egress fees, and premium support charges that can double expenses compared to on-premises infrastructure 1. Repatriation allows companies to achieve a predictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by leveraging modern financing options such as Operational Expenditure (OpEx) models for on-premises infrastructure.</p><p>Vendors like <strong><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/hewlett-packard-enterprise?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-mention">Hewlett Packard Enterprise</a></strong> GreenLake, <strong><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/delltechnologies?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-mention">Dell Technologies</a></strong> APEX, and <strong><a href="https://cn.linkedin.com/company/lenovo?trk=article-ssr-frontend-pulse_little-mention">Lenovo</a></strong> TruScale offer on-premises cloud experiences with flexible consumption models, enabling businesses to avoid large capital expenditures while maintaining control over their IT environments. Extended support contracts further reduce costs by eliminating the traditional 3&#8211;5 year hardware refresh cycle, minimising downtime and disruption.</p><p>Real-world examples demonstrate significant savings. Dropbox saved $74.6 million within two years by moving 90% of its customer data to a custom-built hybrid cloud infrastructure.</p><p>37 Signals estimates savings of over $10 million over five years by repatriating its workloads These case studies highlight the potential for 20&#8211;40% cost savings over 5+ years by repatriating select workloads.</p><h2><strong>Enhanced Control and Security</strong></h2><p>On-premises or dedicated third-party European data centres provide granular visibility into data flows, access controls, and physical security, which is often obscured in multi-tenant cloud environments. Repatriation allows for customised security postures, air-gapped backups, and zero-trust architectures tailored to the organisation&#8217;s exact needs.</p><p>This level of control is particularly important for industries handling highly sensitive data, such as finance and healthcare, where compliance with GDPR and other regulations is non-negotiable. By repatriating data, companies can reduce risks associated with supply chain attacks, misconfigured cloud storage, and vendor lock-in, thereby enhancing their overall security posture.</p><h2><strong>Operational and Strategic Flexibility</strong></h2><p>Cloud providers frequently change pricing, deprecate services, or impose usage limits, which can disrupt business continuity. Repatriation offers companies the freedom to innovate without vendor constraints, whether that means running legacy applications indefinitely, customising hardware for performance-critical workloads (e.g., AI/ML, high-frequency trading), or avoiding forced migrations when providers sunset services. Hybrid models, which combine on-premises infrastructure with cloud burst capacity, provide the best of both worlds: control and agility. This approach allows companies to tailor their IT environments to specific performance and security requirements, driving efficiency and innovation.</p><h2><strong>Sustainability and Environmental Impact</strong></h2><p>Localised data centres, especially those powered by renewable energy, can reduce the carbon footprint of data transit and align with ESG goals. Some European colocation providers offer carbon-neutral hosting, which may be harder to guarantee with global cloud providers. As sustainability initiatives gain traction, repatriation becomes an attractive option for companies seeking to reduce their environmental impact.</p><h2><strong>Practical Roadmap for Repatriation</strong></h2><p><strong>Assess Workloads:</strong> Identify which applications are best suited for repatriation, focusing on latency-sensitive, data-intensive, or compliance-critical workloads.</p><p><strong>Evaluate Financing:</strong> Explore OpEx-based on-premises models or partnerships with European colo providers that offer pay-as-you-grow pricing.</p><p><strong>Plan Migration: </strong>Work with vendors or integrators specialising in cloud exit strategies to minimise downtime and data loss.</p><p><strong>Leverage Automation: </strong>Use tools for infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and containerisation to maintain cloud-like agility in on-premises environments.</p><p><strong>Test and Iterate:</strong> Start with a pilot (e.g., repatriating a single department&#8217;s data) before full-scale migration.</p><h2><strong>Conclusion</strong></h2><p>The trend of data repatriation among European and UK companies is a strategic response to the evolving IT landscape, where data sovereignty, cost efficiency, control, and sustainability have become paramount. While cloud adoption remains valuable, repatriation offers a compelling alternative that aligns with regulatory requirements, reduces long-term costs, enhances security, and provides greater operational flexibility.</p><p>For decision-makers evaluating their cloud strategy, repatriation is not about rejecting the cloud but about reclaiming autonomy and optimising IT infrastructure for the long term. By leveraging modern financing models, extended support contracts, and hybrid architectures, companies can achieve a balanced, future-proof IT environment that supports both innovation and compliance.</p><p>Sources:</p><p>Cloud Repatriation on the Rise - EE Times Europe</p><p>Cloud Repatriation 2025: Why more and more companies are going back to their own data centre - unbyte</p><p>Cloud Trends 2025: Repatriation and sustainability make their marks - InfoWorld.</p><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-strategic-advantages-of-data?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Share&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/the-strategic-advantages-of-data?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p><p 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isPermaLink="false">https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/p/get-the-basics-right</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Vishal Vashisht]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:28:54 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" 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srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1rxb!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd75c9df-83bd-4985-8fd7-23832e78eea9_704x384.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg role="img" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><title></title><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a><figcaption class="image-caption"></figcaption></figure></div><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe now&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="https://vishalvashisht.substack.com/subscribe?"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p><p>Cybersecurity has become one of the most heavily invested areas in modern organisations. Every year, budgets rise, new tools are purchased, and more responsibilities are shifted to third parties. Yet breaches continue to rise in frequency and severity.</p><p>The core problem is not a lack of technology. It&#8217;s that too many organisations are building security on unstable foundations.</p><p>Strong cybersecurity is not something that can be bought in a box, generated by AI, or outsourced into existence. It is an <strong>outcome</strong> of well-run infrastructure, disciplined engineering, mature operations, and&#8212;most importantly&#8212;<strong>experienced, motivated people</strong> who have the time and capacity to do things properly and know the environment, know the users, know the nuances of that particular organisation and can not only think across the silos but are able to talk to people in all the departments.</p><p><strong>1. The Foundation Matters More Than the Toolset</strong></p><p>Most successful attacks do not rely on sophisticated zero-days. They exploit basic, preventable weaknesses&#8212;unpatched systems, misconfigured access, overly flat networks, or brittle legacy infrastructure with no clear ownership. Stressed staff members in all departments clicking on phishing emails because they are doing so many jobs or are fighting deadlines that are impossible to meet so can&#8217;t stop to look and think about what they are doing. This is something that all Security staff training misses.</p><p><strong>Patching: The Most Effective but Neglected Control</strong></p><p>Every breach post-mortem has a familiar refrain: the exploited vulnerability was known and fixable. Patching is not glamorous, not innovative, and not something a CEO can announce in a press release&#8212;but it is one of the single most cost-effective security practices.</p><p>A mature patching regime:</p><ul><li><p>Reduces the opportunity window for attackers</p></li><li><p>Prevents emergency downtime and firefighting</p></li><li><p>Lowers operational and security costs</p></li><li><p>Builds predictability into the environment</p></li></ul><p>The irony is that patching is often deprioritised not because it is hard, but because teams are overstretched or reliant on third parties who do not feel the impact of failure &amp; conversely this is an area that automation can help in.</p><p>However, it should also be noted that the rushed Zero-day patching that cybersecurity professionals can many times panic themselves and senior leadership into forcing without thinking can be worse than being hacked in the first place. How many times have we see badly written, rushed patches to fix a zero day do huge amounts of damage because they &#8220;HAD TO BE INSTALLED NOW!!&#8221; &amp; were never able to be tested first?</p><p><strong>2. Good Infrastructure Practices: The Bedrock of Cyber Resilience</strong></p><p>Security is often discussed as a separate speciality, but the reality is that it sits on top of:</p><ul><li><p>Solid network architecture</p></li><li><p>Standardised, hardened builds</p></li><li><p>Clear lifecycle management</p></li><li><p>Well-documented systems</p></li><li><p>Strict change and configuration controls</p></li></ul><p>When infrastructure is healthy, security becomes exponentially easier. When it is messy, fragmented, or owned by external providers, you cannot secure what you cannot understand.</p><p>Modern, risk-aware infrastructure design&#8212;segmentation, identity-first access, infrastructure-as-code, lifecycle management&#8212;reduces the attack surface before a security tool even enters the conversation. Security tools become amplifiers of good engineering rather than a crutch to compensate for its absence.</p><p>This should also include not defaulting to Microsoft if you&#8217;re on Azure or just plugging in another module from a vendor that you&#8217;re already using. &#8220;Cloud First&#8221; should not be the default and now sovereignty is driving decision, have experts locally who know on-premises equipment.</p><p>How can you secure your data if you don&#8217;t know where it is? Products like Cyera are there to quickly and effectively search for and tag your data. Is it on a user&#8217;s laptop? Has it been copied across to a personal OneDrive?</p><p><strong>3. The Human Factor: Why Fully Staffed, Experienced Teams Outperform Third Parties</strong></p><p>One of the most damaging assumptions in corporate strategy today is the belief that outsourcing is cheaper, and that specialist partners can replace the expertise of internal staff.</p><p><strong>The Risks of Outsourcing and Over-Reliance on Third Parties</strong></p><p>Outsourcing often leads to:</p><ul><li><p>Loss of organisational knowledge</p></li><li><p>Slower response times</p></li><li><p>Higher long-term costs</p></li><li><p>Reduced accountability</p></li><li><p>Limited situational awareness</p></li><li><p>A culture of &#8220;not my job&#8221; or &#8220;it&#8217;s not in our SLA&#8221;</p></li></ul><p>Third parties rarely understand the internal nuances of an organisation. They cannot match the context, instincts, or urgency of people who live within the environment daily.</p><p><strong>Fully Staffed Local Teams Are a Strategic Asset, Not a Cost</strong></p><p>Investing in well-staffed, well-paid, and motivated teams is not a luxury&#8212;it is a cybersecurity control.</p><p>In-house teams:</p><ul><li><p>Understand the environment deeply</p></li><li><p>Detect issues earlier</p></li><li><p>Respond faster in crises</p></li><li><p>Maintain higher-quality systems</p></li><li><p>Reduce reliance on expensive external vendors</p></li><li><p>Build and retain institutional knowledge</p></li><li><p>Make fewer errors because they aren&#8217;t overloaded</p></li></ul><p>The cost of a breach dwarfs the cost of a well-paid engineer.</p><p><strong>Rushed Staff Make Mistakes&#8212;Across Every Department</strong></p><p>Cybersecurity is often framed as a technical problem, but human error is a major contributor to risk. Rushed staff click phishing emails. Overloaded engineers skip testing or defer patching. Burnt-out analysts misconfigure systems. Pressured developers bypass secure coding practices to meet deadlines.</p><p>Understaffing is not a budget efficiency&#8212;it is a direct path to security failures. What is the point of coming up with disaster plans when the staff that created them have been replaced by another 3rd party who still hasn&#8217;t read the documentation or the internal staff that you have trained in Marketing or Finance that knew what to do in a disaster have been replaced or moved on?</p><p><strong>4. Experience Matters: Infrastructure Engineers Are Worth Their Weight in Gold</strong></p><p>There is no substitute for deeply experienced infrastructure engineers&#8212;the people who understand not only how systems should work, but how they fail.</p><p>Security tools identify symptoms. Experienced engineers understand causes.</p><p>These are the individuals who:</p><ul><li><p>Can spot subtle misconfigurations before they become incidents</p></li><li><p>Know how to simplify complex environments</p></li><li><p>Understand interdependencies that tooling cannot infer</p></li><li><p>Build resilient, secure, maintainable architectures</p></li><li><p>Provide the continuity and realism that outsourced teams cannot</p></li></ul><p>The move toward cloud, automation, and AI has created a misconception that traditional infrastructure expertise is less relevant. In reality, the complexity of modern environments makes that experience more valuable than ever.</p><p><strong>5. AI Is a Powerful Tool&#8212;But Not a Silver Bullet</strong></p><p>AI can assist with detection, alert triage, and code analysis. But it cannot replace:</p><ul><li><p>Ownership</p></li><li><p>Good engineering</p></li><li><p>Contextual understanding</p></li><li><p>Human judgement</p></li><li><p>Culture</p></li><li><p>Accountability</p></li></ul><p>AI will amplify whatever foundations it is given. If your infrastructure is poorly maintained, if patching is inconsistent, if teams are stretched thin, AI will simply generate faster alerts about a problem that already existed and has no idea about the human factor. The rushed staff that will click on a link or miss an alert or that person in Marketing who saw the start of a phishing campaign but just deleted the email and went home.</p><p>AI can enhance good security practices, but it cannot fix bad ones.</p><p><strong>6. Fewer Third Parties, More Control, Lower Risk</strong></p><p>Many organisations accumulate vendors, each focused on a narrow task. This leads to:</p><ul><li><p>Fragmented accountability</p></li><li><p>Inconsistent security postures</p></li><li><p>Integration gaps</p></li><li><p>Dependency risk</p></li><li><p>Higher overall cost</p></li></ul><p>Reducing third parties&#8212;and empowering internal teams&#8212;creates end-to-end ownership. Problems get resolved earlier, and decisions are made with full situational awareness.</p><p>Security thrives when responsibility is clear, integrated, and internal.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: The Strongest and Cheapest Cybersecurity Strategy Is Doing the Basics Well</strong></p><p>The narrative that cybersecurity requires constant new spending is misleading. In reality, organisations can be dramatically more secure&#8212;and spend less&#8212;by strengthening their foundations:</p><ul><li><p>Robust patching and configuration management</p></li><li><p>Clean, modern, well-run infrastructure</p></li><li><p>Fully staffed, well-paid internal teams</p></li><li><p>Reduced dependency on third parties</p></li><li><p>Experienced engineers who understand the environment</p></li><li><p>Realistic expectations of AI and automation</p></li></ul><p>Cybersecurity becomes cheaper when environments are simple, stable, well-maintained, and owned by people who care about them.</p><p><strong>Get the basics right, invest in the people who understand your systems, and security stops being a battle. 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