VMware Cloud Foundation: why enterprises are bringing workloads home
This is not cloud failure. It is cloud maturity. Organisations are placing workloads where they perform best, cost least, and meet regulatory demands.
The Softcat News Team
The signals arrived quickly. By the end of 2024, the Barclays CIO Survey found that 86% of CIOs planned to bring some public cloud workloads back in-house. Additional research published in January 2026 found that 87% of enterprises plan to repatriate some or all workloads over the next two years. IDC confirms the pattern: around 80% of organisations expect some level of compute or storage repatriation within twelve months.
Organisations are not abandoning public cloud, they are simply placing workloads where they perform best, cost least, and meet regulatory demands. Industry analysts estimate that 21% of enterprise cloud infrastructure spending, equivalent to $44.5 billion in 2025, is wasted on under-used resources. For steady-state, predictable workloads, the economics of public cloud do not always stack up.
Modern private cloud, not legacy virtualisation
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, released in June 2025, answers that question directly. It is not a hypervisor upgrade. VCF 9.0 is a full-stack private cloud platform that integrates compute, storage, networking, security, and automation under a single subscription. Self-service provisioning, policy-based governance, and consumption tracking come built in.
VCF Automation delivers a public cloud experience on your own infrastructure. Developers request VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and networking through a self-service catalogue. VCF Operations provides cost visibility across your entire estate, covering software licensing, operational spend, and data centre overheads. That is the financial transparency FinOps teams have been asking for.
Networking is integrated from the ground up with NSX, providing distributed switching, routing, and VPN services with FIPS 140-3 compliance enabled by default. Organisations requiring east-west security can add vDefend for distributed firewalling, micro-segmentation, and advanced threat prevention. For regulated workloads, this integrated approach removes the complexity that separate networking and security tools typically introduce.
VCF licences are portable across hyperscaler environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Your private cloud investment travels with your workloads. Nine of the top ten Fortune 500 companies have committed to the platform. The platform’s enterprise maturity is well established. What has changed is the use case driving adoption.
Why UK&I organisations cannot afford to wait
Cost pressure alone would justify a strategic rethink. But for UK and Irish businesses, regulation is accelerating the decision. The UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, introduced in November 2025, brings managed service providers and data centres under regulation for the first time. Data centres were designated Critical National Infrastructure in September 2024. Initial incident notification has been tightened to 24 hours. Fines reach £100,000 per day.
Financial services firms still face tighter constraints. The FCA and PRA operational resilience deadline passed in March 2025. Firms must now demonstrate they can operate within impact tolerances during severe disruption. For organisations with EU operations, DORA (the Digital Operations Resilience Act) adds a parallel compliance obligation.
Data sovereignty further compounds the picture. The US CLOUD Act allows American authorities to compel data disclosure from US-headquartered providers, regardless of where the data is stored. For organisations handling sensitive data under UK GDPR, the conflict demands infrastructure decisions with real consequences. Even the UK Government has shifted from Cloud First toward Cloud Appropriate.
How Softcat helps you navigate the reset
We are a Premier Partner for VMware solutions, representing one of the higher tiers in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. Holding over 100 certifications across the full stack. We also hold a seat on Broadcom’s VMware Partner Advisory Board.
That depth matters as the platform evolves. VCF 9.0 represents a significant step forward in what the private cloud can deliver. We help customers assess how VCF fits their environment as not every organisation needs the full platform on day one. The right approach depends on workload profile, regulatory exposure, and commercial priorities.
Our FinOps practice connects directly to this conversation. We deployed CloudHealth by VMware for NHS Digital, delivering 25% savings across their cloud estate. That same discipline applies to private cloud cost modelling and hybrid estate governance. We have guided organisations from 50 to 5,000 VMs through VCF transitions.
The cloud strategy your organisation needs now
The default-to-public-cloud era is behind us. Organisations that gain the most from their technology investments are those that deliberately place workloads. Private cloud for predictable, sensitive, and performance-critical workloads. Public cloud, where elasticity and global reach justify the premium.
Whether you are approaching a VMware renewal, reviewing cloud costs, or preparing for new regulatory obligations, Softcat can help. Talk to our Hybrid Platform team, or simply contact our Sales team, about a VCF assessment or FinOps review.