Public trust is the bedrock upon which successful businesses are built. Without the faith and confidence of their customers, even the largest corporations crumble. This applies to every industry, but it takes on heightened significance for cloud service providers. 

Cloud computing platforms have become an indispensable backbone supporting critical aspects of modern society. From powering vital infrastructure and hosting mission-critical applications to safeguarding precious data reserves, cloud services are the engine room of the digital experiences and workflows that keep the world running smoothly. 

Given this pivotal role, it is imperative that cloud providers zealously guard and cultivate the public’s trust. Users must have confidence that their needs are the top priority—not the profit motives of a handful of dominant players. Any erosion of this trust poses an existential threat. 

Recent developments, however, have cast a shadow over the industry, sparking fears of unfair competitive practices, soaring costs, and prohibitive vendor lock-in. This troubling trajectory and the context of rising profits by the likes of hyperscaler providers such as Amazon and Microsoft may be contributing to growing cloud repatriation trends. 

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware: A case study in broken trust 

Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMware has emerged as an inflection point. The acquisition and the subsequent business decisions have rattled consumer confidence right across the industry. The chipmaker’s aggressive restructuring, including transitioning VMware’s portfolio to subscription-only licensing, divesting the virtual desktop division, upending reseller channels, and severe cost-cutting through layoffs, has created chaos among VMware’s enterprise customers. These changes have led to concerns about future costs, vendor lock-in risks, and disruptions to purchasing relationships. 

The dismantling of VMware’s established partner channels and supplier relationships has been particularly damaging to customer trust. For many enterprises, these were long-standing procurement relationships built over years or decades. Sharp cost escalations have left many businesses scrambling, as suddenly unaffordable pricing threatens to render long-standing business models untenable. For some, the financial viability of their operations is now in jeopardy, forcing a hasty revaluation of budgets and IT strategies.  

This shattering of the customer-supplier dynamic has provoked deep introspection. If a vendor can so brazenly upend relationships and purchasing mechanisms at the drop of a hat, it sends a chilling message about where customer interests truly lie in the hierarchy of business objectives. Enterprises are now being forced to reassess whether their cloud providers view them as valued partners invested in their success, or merely rent-seeking tenants. 

As Broadcom reshapes VMware’s model, many organisations are weighing potential exits to more open cloud and virtualisation alternatives. This preserves flexibility and mitigates risks around soaring costs or prohibitive lock-in under the new regime. However, it also reflects a fundamental loss of trust that Broadcom’s VMware will place the needs of its customers over its own. 

The tumultuous transition underscores the pressing need for cloud customers to prioritise transparency, portability, multi-cloud enablement, and open ecosystems when charting long-term strategies. Broadcom’s consolidation betrays the fundamental promise of cloud computing as a force for enterprise agility and choice. More critically, it has shaken customers’ faith that even long-tenured partners have their best interests at heart when consolidation and profit-making are on the table. 

Trust in the cloud: Industry-wide scrutiny 

Trust in cloud providers is not merely a concern limited to the internal business models of individual firms; it encapsulates a broad spectrum of issues that impact the entire industry and sour public perception. With rising concerns about data privacy, competitive fairness, and customer treatment, it’s become clear that the trust deficit extends beyond one or two companies to touch upon the very foundations of the cloud computing industry.  

In a pivotal move, the UK’s Communications Regulator Ofcom referred the cloud infrastructure services market to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for an in-depth anti-trust investigation. Ofcom raised red flags around practices like charging excessive data egress fees to deter switching providers, restricting interoperability across clouds, offering discounts that lock in customers, and opaque software licensing tactics.  

Launched in October 2023, the CMA is now conducting a high-stakes 18-month probe that could institute sweeping reforms. Potential interventions include banning egress fees, mandating cross-platform transparency, and curbing exclusionary pricing schemes. However, the extended timeline has stoked fears that cloud leaders could further cement their dominance before any corrective actions.  

The intensifying regulatory glare sends a clear message: if regulators cannot trust providers, how can their customers? As the investigation unfolds, its findings could reshape market dynamics – paving the way for true consumer choice and restored trust. 

The market-wide implications of IT failures

Beyond cloud services, the conversation around IT resilience and consumer trust has recently been writ large across headlines globally by the international Microsoft outage in July 2024. This incident, caused by a faulty update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide, disrupting critical sectors including airlines, healthcare, and financial institutions.

When a single software glitch can ground flights, disrupt healthcare globally, and potentially compromise cyber defences for countless organisations, we’re facing more than a technical hiccup or a breach of consumer trust – it’s a potential national security crisis. The concentration of critical services among a few providers creates dangerous single points of failure, susceptible to both technical errors and malicious exploitation.

The incident lays bare a crucial reality: trust is not merely an issue of individual companies, but a reflection of systemic vulnerabilities within the broader IT marketplace. This event exposes how the interconnected nature of our digital infrastructure creates a domino effect, where a single point of failure can cascade across multiple sectors and geographies. It reveals the hidden fragility of a market that has become increasingly concentrated, with a handful of providers forming the backbone of global IT systems. The rapid and widespread repercussions of the CrowdStrike update are an urgent call for a more diversified, robust IT landscape – one where trust is built on the strength of the entire system, not just the reputation of individual players.

Strategies that foster trust 

At Civo, our business practices are built around the belief that earning and maintaining customer trust is foundational. Our services are anchored in openness, flexibility, and customer control. Unlike traditional public clouds, our CivoStack Enterprise model provides the software stack for organisations to build their own open source-based clouds across any infrastructure – averting proprietary lock-in while enabling seamless workload portability. 

We are also dedicated to transparent pricing models, long-term cost commitments, and the ability to reduce total cloud costs by up to 75% versus hyperscaler alternatives. These promises give customers the confidence that their investment is both stable and predictable, crucial aspects for long-term planning and financial security.  

This approach not only fosters a sense of partnership and trust between us and our customers but also challenges the prevailing industry norms of opaque and fluctuating pricing models. By championing open source, multi-cloud mobility, and pricing transparency, we empower businesses to allocate resources more efficiently and innovate without the fear of unexpected expenses undermining their growth. Ultimately, this strengthens the entire ecosystem by promoting healthier competition and greater trust in cloud computing as a sustainable, customer-centric industry.

Restoring trust through openness 

Recent events have profoundly unsettled enterprises relying on cloud platforms for digital transformation. Restrictive data controls, prohibitive lock-in tactics, and opaque pricing policies have coalesced into a marketplace that seems increasingly hostile to consumer interests. 

To reverse this concerning trajectory, cloud giants must take deliberate action, prioritising transparency, choice, and flexibility above all else. This demands recognition from the major providers that trust needs to be earned and maintained. What is needed are substantive commitments to open standards, robust data sovereignty guarantees, consistent cross-platform integration, and genuinely portable multi-cloud models.  

For enterprises, charting cloud strategies centred on these principles has become imperative to mitigate risks of costs spiralling out of control, continuity disruptions, and loss of control over their cloud destiny. Partnering with transparently open providers aligned with this ethos is the surest path to preserving trust and avoiding being held hostage to any single vendor’s interests. 

The cloud computing industry stands at a critical moment. Either the dominant providers can course-correct by unreservedly recommitting to openness and consumer interests, or they risk an accelerating exodus as organisations seek out trustworthy alternatives putting transparency, portability, and multi-cloud empowerment before consolidation and control.