Cloud adoption is no longer a question of if, it’s how well you manage what’s already in place. In 2025, fine‑tuned control over your cloud environment is essential.
A Gartner report warns that by 2028, one in four organisations will be dissatisfied with their cloud outcomes, often due to immature governance and poor visibility over spending. That’s a wake‑up call for IT leaders: scale and agility need structure, or they waste money and invite risk.
If you’re running Microsoft 365, Azure VMs and PaaS, you’ve already modernised. The next question is how do you stay in control once you're in the cloud?
The answer isn’t all-in or all-out, it’s about designing for flexibility, so your cloud strategy can respond to change, not just keep up with it.
This blog explores the key risks IT leaders are facing in 2025 and shows how a smart, hybrid infrastructure strategy can help you stay flexible, resilient and in control.
What IT leaders are thinking about in 2025
Cloud is no longer an emerging strategy, it’s the default. Most businesses are running Microsoft 365, Azure VMs and platform services across their core environments. But as cloud maturity grows, so do the priorities.
Valid concerns being raised include:
Resilience in the face of outages
Public cloud platforms offer impressive uptime, but no system is immune to disruption. Global outages, regional slowdowns, and service-specific issues still happen and when they do, recovery isn't always on your terms. IT teams are now asking:
- Do we have a business continuity plan beyond our primary cloud region?
- Can we run critical workloads somewhere else, even temporarily?
Freedom to adapt or exit if needed
As more businesses embed themselves in cloud-native tools and proprietary services, there’s growing awareness of the trade-offs:
- Are our workloads portable or have we tied ourselves too closely to a single vendor?
- What would it take to shift workloads to another platform or bring them back on-prem?
These aren’t signs of doubt, they’re signs of maturity. Thinking through exit strategies, platform flexibility and failover is part of running resilient infrastructure.
AI-driven capacity concerns
As AI adoption increases, demand for GPU-powered workloads is surging. But availability isn't always guaranteed:
- Will our cloud provider have the compute capacity when we need it?
- Do we need to consider on-prem GPU infrastructure for certain workloads?
These questions are less about abandoning cloud and more about planning around its limits.
What does this all point to?
A growing need for hybrid strategies that allow you to:
- Recover faster during outages
- Stay in control of costs and architecture
- Support AI and analytics workloads with the flexibility they require
Balancing cost predictability with cloud flexibility
Cloud platforms promised flexibility and they’ve delivered. But in 2025, flexibility often comes with complexity.
Every API call, log query and scaling event carries a price. So does cloud networking, especially moving data between zones or egressing entirely. While the cloud model makes sense in theory, the reality in 2025 is that predicting spend is harder than ever, even for seasoned IT teams. Month-to-month bills fluctuate, and forecasting costs across dynamic workloads and multiple regions often leads to surprises.
On the other hand, on-prem infrastructure comes with capital cost but with a more predictable spend – at least until you need to scale. You know what you’ve paid, what you’re running, and how it’s managed.
The smarter approach? Blend the two.
Keep your agile workloads in the cloud and pull back high-volume, stable or cost-sensitive services to local infrastructure.
It’s not about choosing one model over the other. It’s about using the strengths of each and keeping both cost and performance under your control.
The benefits of a hybrid infrastructure model
A hybrid approach isn’t just a technical compromise, it’s a smarter, more flexible way to run your business.
Instead of sending everything to the cloud or everything on-prem, hybrid lets you do both and choose the right environment for the job.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Stronger control over your operations
You decide where critical workloads live. That means less waiting, more visibility, and the ability to respond faster when issues arise. - Built-in business continuity
If there’s a cloud outage in your region, you’re not stuck. With a hybrid setup, you’ve got backup infrastructure ready to take over so you can keep running. - Better cost predictability
Some cloud costs are hard to forecast. Hybrid gives you more control by letting you keep stable, predictable workloads on infrastructure you own and use cloud when you need to scale. - Freedom to move without starting from scratch
When your setup is flexible, you’re not locked in. You can adapt, shift workloads, or respond to change without a major rebuild or disruption. - Support for your most demanding apps
Whether you're running AI workloads, licensing-intensive platforms, or large-scale analytics, a hybrid setup allows you to run these workloads on dedicated infrastructure without competing for resources in a shared cloud environment. It’s not about speed, it’s about consistency, control and guaranteed capacity when it counts.
Hybrid means more control, more options and less risk especially in a world where infrastructure has to do more than just run.
How Azure Local infrastructure strengthens hybrid strategies
For many Australian businesses, Azure is already the backbone of their cloud environment. With multiple Azure regions now available nationally, most organisations can achieve low-latency, high-performance connectivity without relying on global zones or complex edge deployments.
But relying solely on the cloud doesn’t solve every challenge.
That’s where a hybrid model anchored in Azure Local infrastructure comes into play. By combining Azure with on-premises or co-located resources, you can extend your architecture and give your business more options without stepping away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
Here’s how Azure Local enables smarter hybrid strategies:
- Performance where you need it
For workloads like ERP, analytics or virtual desktops, Azure provides a low-latency, high-availability environment, while hybrid infrastructure ensures you’re not sharing capacity in ways that affect consistency. - Business continuity without complexity
With hybrid infrastructure, you can create an on-premise Azure Site Recovery location, ensuring backup and recovery stays in your control, even when a primary region is affected. - Control without compromise
Manage your on-premise or co-located infrastructure directly through the Azure portal, giving your team a single, familiar interface. - Cloud-native services, on-prem
Consume Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure Kubernetes Service on-premises as needed, allowing you to scale services flexibly while maintaining data sovereignty or compliance. - Predictable and validated infrastructure
Receive cluster-aware updates from Microsoft and your hardware vendors in pre-tested, validated packages reducing risk and simplifying management. - Unified operations with Azure Arc
Use tools like Azure Arc, Monitor, and Defender to extend security, monitoring and governance across both cloud and local infrastructure, without needing multiple platforms or skillsets.
In short, Azure Local gives you the power of cloud without giving up choice, control or cost visibility. It’s a strong foundation for businesses across Australia to modernise at their own pace, with the resilience today’s infrastructure demands.
With smart infrastructure design, you don’t have to choose between scale and stability. You can embrace cloud innovation without handing over the keys completely.
Ready to regain control of your cloud strategy without losing what you’ve built?
Contact us to explore your options, from hybrid infrastructure design to deployment and infrastructure managed services. We’ll help you modernise with confidence and stay in control, no matter what’s next.
