For years, “just put it all in the public cloud” seemed safe. Hyperscale platforms offered limitless scale, global reach, and rapid innovation, especially in AI.
But as bills rose and architectures grew complex, many realized an uncomfortable truth: hyperscale-only isn’t truly a cloud strategy. It’s just what organizations have defaulted to – and it’s becoming expensive.
Today, 84% of organizations cite cloud cost management as their top challenge, and despite growing FinOps maturity, 27% of IaaS/PaaS spend is still wasted. Budget overruns stand at around 17%, services are proliferating, and predictability is harder to come by.
With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why IT department and leadership need to stop viewing hyperscale as their first option. Instead, they should be asking, “Is public cloud the right place for this workload today and going forward?”
When Elasticity Morphs to Overspend
Hyperscale pricing is built and optimized for elasticity. Which is great when workloads spike, but painful when they don’t:
- 32% of IT budget is spent on cloud waste – which happens when steady-state workloads are deployed on agile, on-demand infrastructure they don’t truly require.
- Even with FinOps, 27% of IaaS/PaaS spend is still wasted, as well as 24% of cloud software investment.
- Complex billing models that span compute, storage, NAT, load balancers, snapshots, API calls, and data egress make accurate forecasting difficult.
There’s another interesting angle to account for: hyperscale resources channeled into AI development in 2025. The AI arms race has led organizations to neglect the optimization of the existing non-AI tools and traditional cloud services they rely on every day. Meanwhile, hyperscale AI increases business costs exponentially (compute, network, data movement, and storage), diverting budget from innovation.
For the stable, predictable workloads that make up the core of many businesses, Expedient Private Cloud is on average 30% less expensive than hyperscale alternatives. The cost advantage grows further when you factor in licensing efficiencies, which can save around $300,000 per year for a typical client. Expedient Private Cloud allows organizations to recover cost predictability with pricing aligned to consistent consumption, not volatility.
Shared-By-Design Hurts Reliability
Hyperscale platforms are engineered for massive, multi-tenant scale. But that comes with trade-offs, including:
- The noisy-neighbor effect, which potentially degrades database and transaction performance.
- Premium support that’s limited and expensive; many teams build their own site reliability engineering layer.
- Outages around critical services that cost thousands to over a million dollars per hour.
In contrast, Expedient Private Cloud resources are right-sized, dedicated to the workload profile, and backed by a 100% infrastructure uptime SLA – translating to predictable behavior for core systems.
Architectural Mismatch: Not Every App Is Hyperscale Cloud Ready
Hyperscale excels at cloud-native, microservice, and bursty workloads, but many businesses still run legacy apps, latency-sensitive databases, ERP systems, and core systems that aren’t designed for distributed architectures. In a public cloud, these solutions will experience slower performance, higher costs, and data governance challenges across regions and sites.
Expedient’s analysis and client experience show that traditional applications run 1.5–2x as performant in a private cloud designed to mirror their original architecture with low-latency networking and dedicated resources.
Data gravity compounds the business case: large, regulated datasets are costly to move and bound by sovereignty constraints. Private cloud is their natural home. Organizations can improve performance and governance by keeping data-heavy workloads close to their data.
Private Cloud as a Performance and Cost Advantage
This isn’t about rejecting hyperscale. It’s about ending a “blind” hyperscale-only mindset and taking proper consideration of application requirements. The market is already there: 70% of organizations now run hybrid cloud – using at least one public and one private cloud – and treating workload placement as a strategic decision rather than a default.
Steady-state workloads
High data gravity
Latency sensitive applications
Compliance-first environments
Bursty demand
Short-lived dev/test
Cloud-native architectures
Turning Strategy into Outcomes
When you step back from the noise, the pattern is clear:
- Hyperscale-only overspends on predictability.
- Private cloud restores performance, control, and cost discipline.
- A workload-first model achieves both innovation and economics.
What your business stands to gain with Expedient Private Cloud:
- Cost Control: Move stable workloads to private infrastructure to enable approximately 30% savings.
- Predictability: Eliminate surprise fees and egress penalties and cost.
- Performance: Run traditional apps where they’re 1.5–2x faster.
- Reliability: Take advantage of dedicated resources and a 100% infrastructure uptime SLA for critical systems.
The hyperscale honeymoon may be over, but for businesses that rebalance intelligently, the next chapter can deliver better economics, performance, and results.
Ready to Explore Your Cloud Rebalancing Opportunity?
See what an optimized best-fit solution could look like for your organization. Find out more about Expedient Private Cloud today.
