James Solomon
Enterprise Product Portfolio Manager, JT
The cloud remains essential. But the strongest strategy is no longer cloud-first – it’s workload first.
We spoke with JT Enterprise Product Portfolio Manager, James Solomon, about why it’s time for a more discerning approach to hosting decisions. He shared his thoughts on how organisations can decide which of their workloads belong in the public cloud and which are better kept on private or dedicated infrastructure.
For much of the last decade, businesses invested heavily in cloud adoption to enjoy the flexibility of adjusting their computing resources as needed. But repatriations are rising as cloud spend increases faster than actual usage. According to Flexera’s latest State of the Cloud report, organisations globally waste an estimated 29% of their IaaS and PaaS allocation. That’s close to a third of core infrastructure budgets barely earning their keep.
To reconcile cost with capability, many firms are making greater use of hybrid cloud. This middle ground is now the dominant architecture, used by 73% of surveyed organisations.
“These trends taken together suggest that companies are becoming more deliberate about where individual workloads create the most value,” says James of the current environment. “They’re not rejecting the cloud. But they’re more vigilant about questioning whether each workload is in the right environment for what the business now needs it to do.”
Technology estates have become fragmented
Many organisations operate complex technology estates: they deliberately keep core records and low-latency systems on private infrastructure but use public cloud for elastic capacity. It’s still common to see workloads in legacy platforms on-premises, as well as front- and back-office functions that rely on SaaS. The individual services within this patchwork often cross several environments and suppliers.
“That fragmentation isn’t necessarily a problem,” James explains. “But it makes it harder to determine who is accountable when something goes wrong – and ultimately how the service will recover from disruption.”
For companies that cannot account for service dependencies, the compliance risks are high. Under the EU’s DORA, financial institutions – even when they rely on external providers – are fully responsible for managing their technology risks. In the UK, the Bank of England expects regulated firms to identify which business services are critical and which suppliers they depend on. They must also have a testing plan in place to ascertain whether those services can continue operating within the agreed limits during major outages.
Each workload demands a different decision
The problem is that fragmented estates contain workloads with very different requirements for which a binary cloud-versus-on-premise mindset may be too restrictive. Instead of defaulting to blanket hosting arrangements, it’s more prudent for companies to consider each workload’s role and requirements: what it does, the data it uses, the experience it must deliver, the rules it must satisfy, and the consequences if it becomes unavailable.
“At JT, we start with the workload and the business outcome, then work back to the right environment and operating model,” James explains. “Public cloud, private cloud and dedicated infrastructure are all valid answers. In many cases, the right answer is a connected combination of them all,” he adds.
Evaluating each workload from five key considerations can help companies determine where they should run:
| Area | Key questions |
| Security | How sensitive is the data?
Who needs privileged access? What level of isolation is appropriate? |
| Compliance | Where may the data be stored and processed?
What evidence will the organisation need to provide? |
| Performance | What latency does the workload require?
How much throughput is necessary? What compute profile is appropriate? |
| Resilience | How quickly must the service recover?
What does the service depend on? How will recovery be tested? |
| Cost | Is demand elastic or predictable?
What is the full lifecycle cost of running and managing the workload? |
These questions need to be revisited periodically, especially whenever something significant changes, such as new regulations or rising infrastructure costs. Regular reviews should verify whether each workload is still running in the most suitable environment.
“It’s not enough to conduct an assessment once and assume that the task is finished,” James explained. “Future-ready workload-first thinking requires ongoing scrutiny and discipline.”
“Companies need to fluidly reassess and adapt. They need a repeatable protocol for deciding whether a system is still in the right environment based on what it does, and then continually assess the risk around its dependencies. JT can help them do that.”
Put your workloads in the right place
JT’s Adaptive Cloud Healthcheck shows you where your applications and systems currently run and whether their placement is still optimal. From there, we work with your team to:
Place each service in the right environment
JT can run elastic workloads in Azure and put those that need tighter control or predictable performance on private or dedicated infrastructure. If a workload is already in the right place, we’ll recommend keeping it there.
Protect and manage them properly
We can match the level of backup and recovery protection to how critical each workload is, and then monitor and respond to incidents.
Keep your environments connected
JT can integrate cloud and infrastructure services with the connectivity and data protection needed to keep them working together, securely and reliably.
Access specialist expertise through one partner
We may bring in Synapse, our cloud and infrastructure specialist within the wider JT Group, as needed. But however many specialists are involved, JT remains your single point of accountability. You won’t have to manage multiple supplier relationships.
“Public cloud isn’t always the answer, and neither is on-premises. That’s why workload-first thinking isn’t about finding reasons to migrate in either direction. JT helps you put each workload in the right place and maintain oversight of services that depend on multiple environments,” James concludes.
Secure. Resilient. Future Ready.
Book a no-obligation call with our financial services specialists, or schedule an Adaptive Cloud Healthcheck to review your estate.
