Private Cloud as a Service: Who Should Ditch Public Cloud—-and When?
“Just move everything to the cloud” sounded simple—until invoices and compliance audits piled up. Private cloud as a service (PCaaS) offers a different path: the elasticity of cloud delivered on hardware you control, operated for you by specialists like iShift + Platform9.
Why public-cloud fatigue is rising
Runaway spend. We break down the $60 B jump in cloud bills in our recent FinOps Cost Benchmark report.
Budget control is now #1 pain. 84 % of IT leaders told us in State of the Cloud 2025 that unpredictable invoices top their headache list.
License sticker shock. See the math in The High Cost of Vendor Lock-In: VMware Edition—some clients faced 500-1,000 % price hikes after Broadcom’s takeover.
What is private cloud as a service?
Managed platform – you supply servers or colo; iShift runs the stack as a SaaS-like service.
Open-source DNA – Kubernetes, KVM & OpenStack power VMs and containers (good-bye VMware tax).
Elastic billing – pay per core / GB RAM with no egress surprises.
Five signals it’s time to switch
You face strict compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP) that frowns on multi-tenant drift.
Workloads are predictable—reserved instances feel overpriced.
Egress or license costs suddenly dwarf infrastructure value.
You need single-digit-ms latency for trading, IoT, or real-time analytics.
GenAI / GPU burn: hourly cloud GPU pricing vaporizes margins.
Why iShift + Platform9 make PCaaS painless
2-week assessment → hardware rightsizing, TCO model, compliance gap map.
24 / 7 SRE operations – patching, monitoring, incident response handled for you.
Built-in cyber resilience – zero-trust access, SIEM hooks, DR run-books from day one (details in our Enterprise Cybersecurity Service).
Quarterly FinOps reviews – so your private cloud as a service stays cheaper than public.
Success snapshot
A data-services firm moved analytics clusters to PCaaS, slashing compute spend by 75 %.
“Running in the public cloud cost us four times more,” their CTO said after switching to Platform9.
30-Day Private Cloud as a Service Pilot
Week
Milestone
1
Kickoff, TCO comparison, compliance checklist
2
Pilot migration of 10 VMs / containers
3
Production rollout + security hardening
4
Knowledge-transfer workshops & hand-off
Quick self-checklist
If you answer yes to 3 + of these, explore PCaaS now:
Are cloud invoices > 20 % over forecast?
Do data-sovereignty rules block certain workloads from AWS/Azure?
Is GenAI compute throttled by on-demand GPU pricing?
Still carrying costly VMware licenses post-Broadcom?
Does security struggle with multi-tenant risk?
Ready to compare numbers?
Book a free TCO + compliance audit—we’ll show exactly where private cloud as a service beats public cloud.
