Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloud residency has moved from a technical preference to a board-level control question, as organisations are being asked to evidence who can access data, under which jurisdictions, and what happens when something goes wrong across borders. A Gartner survey of CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe found that 61% expect geopolitical factors to increase their reliance on local or regional cloud providers, while also predicting that by 2030, more than 75% of enterprises outside the US will have a digital sovereignty strategy.

More UK organisations are treating cloud location as a governance risk decision, because incidents and audits expose questions around jurisdiction, access and evidence. Recent research found that 87% of respondents plan to partially or fully move workloads away from the public cloud over the next two years, with 54% considering private cloud, 38% exploring greater reliance on their own data centres, and 36% assessing colocation.

Imagine sending a letter to your neighbour across the street, only for it to be routed through London or even Amsterdam before landing in their letterbox. This is effectively what happens to much of Scotland's internet traffic. Despite physical proximity between users, businesses and services, digital data is frequently sent on needlessly long journeys, often leaving the country before reaching its destination. This approach is inefficient, costly and poses questions about privacy, resilience and digital sovereignty.

Organisations running AI workloads, like banks training fraud detection models, hospitals testing diagnostic tools, or manufacturers using predictive analytics, all face the same problem: hosting them is costly and resource-intensive. They require dedicated GPUs running non-stop, vast amounts of data moving in and out, and far more power and cooling than a typical IT system.

This year is set to be a pivotal year for cloud strategy, with repatriation gaining momentum due to shifting legislative, geopolitical, and technological pressures. This trend has accelerated, with a growing focus on data sovereignty. These challenges have set the stage for 2026 to be the year of repatriation, resilience, and regional rebalancing. Here, Rob Coupland, Chief Executive Officer at Pulsant, offers his insights.