Modern Private Cloud: Balancing Operational Agility with Data Sovereignty

AI is forcing a hard reset on cloud strategy in Europe. Sovereignty, locality, and private cloud are no longer edge cases—they’re becoming core to how enterprises scale AI without new dependencies.

In this conversation, Nick Patience, Vice President and Practice Lead, AI at The Futurum Group, is joined by Lars Göbel, Chief Revenue Officer at evoila, to examine why sovereign and hyper-local cloud models are gaining momentum across Europe. As AI workloads move into production, control, locality, and automation are becoming board-level infrastructure decisions rather than a policy checkbox. Regulatory pressure, geopolitical risk, and AI-driven workloads are forcing leaders to answer harder questions: where data lives, who controls it, and how systems scale without creating new dependencies.

Drawing on Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation strategy and evoila’s hyper-local deployment model, our guests share how enterprises are modernizing private cloud environments without sacrificing agility. As AI inference, RAG, and regulated workloads move into production, they underscore that infrastructure decisions made today will directly shape resilience, compliance, and long-term flexibility.

Key Takeaways:
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🔷 Sovereignty is about control, not just location: Enterprises want confidence they can keep operating, keep ownership of data, and avoid external “on/off switch” dependencies.

🔷 VCF is becoming the private cloud default stack: Standardized deployment and automation reduce the time, complexity, and “multi-year-project” drag that defined older private cloud builds.

🔷 Hyperlocal private cloud changes the provider equation: Local proximity plus workload mobility across compatible environments creates choice without sacrificing compliance-led architectures.

🔷 Ecosystem growth will likely come with consolidation: Demand is rising, but not every provider can meet the required operational bar.

🔷 Repatriation is a strategic reset: Economics, sovereignty, and private AI needs are converging—hybrid remains real, but private is becoming central.
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Learn more at Broadcom and evoila.
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Listen to the audio: 

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Nick Patience:
Hi, I'm Nick Patience, I'm the AI Platforms Practice Lead at Futurum Group, and we are here for a Six Five Media virtual webcast, and I'm speaking with Lars from evoila. 

Lars Göbel: 

Hi, Lars. Hi, Nick. Nice to meet you. 

Nick Patience: 

Good to speak to you. So we're talking about how enterprises move beyond the kind of one fits all cloud mindset and how leaders are rethinking some of their infrastructure decisions in the face of rising sovereignty, regulatory and AI driven pressures. So just to kick it off Lars, so Europe is a bit of an inflection point regarding cloud strategy. What's changing in the market that's pushing more organisations to look beyond public cloud and take sovereignty and local control more seriously?

Lars Göbel: 

Yes, definitely. Due to the political situations we have, right, and the whole development, what's going forward at the moment, sovereignty is getting bigger and bigger. That's one key fact. And the other key fact is, if we talk over private AI or AI assistant and things like that, Of course, the data is even more available, right? And people are thinking, OK, should I put my whole business, maybe at the end of the day, into a public cloud or not? And this is also underlining the sovereignty and private cloud aspect, which we're seeing moving forward.

Nick Patience: 

Yeah, you mentioned sovereignty. So sovereign cloud has been used a lot already in the beginning of this year in 2026, but it can mean different things to different people and different organizations. But when customers talk to you, what do you think they actually mean by it? And what does real sovereignty look like on day-to-day operations?

Lars Göbel: 

So that's very interesting, because if we talk to our customers, at the end of the day, sovereignty is always the key topic about having the security that if things happen, they can further operate their business, right? They have full control and ownership of the data. And there's nobody else deciding if their systems are up and running, yes or no. But that's the customer side, right? If we look into the market and especially in the vendor side, There are so many different definitions of sovereign. Some hyperscalers define sovereignty due to they have realized a different company who is operating the environment, but is not changing anything mainly. Sovereignty is also about the technology you use for some. So we had quite interesting talks with the European Commission and customers about sovereignty is only possible with open source technologies. But if we look back into the fact that customers want to have ownership and control, this is also possible with technologies you buy, but you implement and operate on your own. And so from our point of view, that's a major point we see at the customers, right? They want to own it, they want to operate it on their own, and they don't want to have huge dependencies on somebody outside of maybe the country who can decide if the environment is running or not.

Nick Patience:

 Yeah, so it's more than just about data residency. It's more that ownership and control that makes it sovereign. Yeah, makes sense. Absolutely. So I know your company works closely with Broadcom and with VMware in particular. And we're also hearing VMware's Cloud Foundation, VCF, come up more and more in conversations. Why do you think VCF is becoming such a critical platform for companies that want to modernize without giving up that control that we've been talking about?

Lars Göbel: So we as Evola are doing VMware Cloud Foundation projects since VCF was released in the first version, a long time ago. And to be honest, at that time, VCF was more a combination of different products. After the acquisition of VMware from Broadcom, Broadcom invested a huge amount of man days and money to develop out of these different products one VMware Cloud Foundation product. And that's a huge benefit for our customers. Because now they have one automated controlled deployment procedure for really private cloud environment. And that's a huge game changer, right? In the past, we were so often talking with customers about realizing private clouds and it was always projects about months or years, a lot of investment. But now you really can go forward and deploy VMware Cloud Foundation as your stack. And from infrastructure as a service over container as a service, platform as a service, data as a service, or even private AI capabilities with private AI foundation, you have the full stack and availability. Broadcom is further investing into that to create the de facto standard for private cloud. And we see that this is working out for the customers, right? And again, like I said, sovereignty, if I have my data center, if I have my hardware, I own the licenses, I deploy and operate it, maybe use a partner together, but then I have full sovereignty, right? Because there's nobody able to turn off my environment, to move it away or something like that. And from that point of view, we see Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation technology is a really, really awesome, standardized, automated, private cloud environment, which is full sovereign.

Nick Patience: 

So your company EVO-LR talks about a kind of hyperlocal model instead of a centralized cloud approach. How does that change the way service providers and customers think about ownership, compliance and long-term flexibility?

Lars Göbel: 

So historically we as EVO-LR had always a lot of VMware service providers as consulting partners, right, service partners. And we see on one hand the need for standardization, automization, and also the capability that cloud environments are compatible to each other so that I can move data and workloads from one cloud to the other. But what we also see is that the German or the European cloud way could be similar to the situation in the economy, right? We don't have these huge companies. We have a lot of medium-sized companies in Europe, Mittelstand and so on. If we bring all these service providers which are able to serve their customers with additional managed services on top, if we bring them on one VMware Cloud Foundation stack, hyper-local, so one in Vienna, one in Frankfurt, one in Hamburg, one in Madrid, so over the different locations where they operate their customers, then they are close to their customers, they still can serve with their managed services, but also the customers have the possibility of choice and easy move capabilities between the cloud environments, right? And due to that, in our opinion, all these service providers can now adopt VMware Cloud Foundation and create one big environment for all customers together. And that's what we call hyperlocal VCFS service, what we offer to the service providers, customers, to create this capability and strengthen the sovereignty we have in Europe, right?

Nick Patience: 

Yeah, that makes sense. So you're seeing strong momentum across multiple European markets. What does that adoption tell you about where Sovereign Cloud is heading and how do you see the ecosystem evolving over the next year?

Lars Göbel: 

So I strongly believe that the ecosystem now needs to adopt this technology. And to be honest, there are service providers who will be able to do that and some service providers who will not be able to do that. So, in total, I believe that the ecosystem will get stronger, but with less partners. In the meantime, Broadcom will further invest in private AI, they will further invest in data topics and platform topics. and further develop this stack. They also attract new partners for the ecosystem to provide solutions for that private cloud environment in a marketplace way so that things like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and so on have available publicly today. will come available in a private cloud as well and consumable not as a software as a service where you have this sovereignty topics. You can deploy it as a service on your own with full sovereignty. So, in all, I think the ecosystem will grow, the partner landscape will get concentrated, and the sovereignty will increase. And due to the technology advantages of VMware Cloud Foundation, that can happen without a loss of modernization capabilities and without a loss of modernization where we especially need to focus on in Europe, right?

Nick Patience: 

Yeah, makes sense. Just lastly, we're hearing a lot about cloud repatriation. Do you think this is simply sort of correcting an over rotation towards cloud that's happened over the last few years? Or does this signal something deeper in the economic and risk trade-offs?

Lars Göbel: 

At the end of the day, I see both. Some people say it's all about the price. Some people say it's all about sovereignty. But it's not so easy, like very often or always in life, right? If we look into our customers from small, medium sized companies to really huge companies, it's always also a combination, right? So first of all, when we go five, six years back, like I already said, private clouds were a huge investment in developing it. Nothing was in the market to have it out of the box like it is today with VMware Cloud Foundation. And that's a huge change, right? So if you wanted to accelerate, if you want to transform your IT to next level, if you wanted to use modern new technologies in a fast way, Several years ago, there was no other option investing into a huge environment on your own, what takes a long time, or going into the hyperscalers. And that changed now. The technology is ready, the technology is there, you can deploy it and use it. And due to that, this is a really major change of possibilities you have. That's the main game changer from our side, we see at the customers. And then on top, you see cost perspectives, you see sovereignty perspective, you see data privacy perspectives, you see the repatriation due to private AI stuff and things like that. And the combination out of that is then changing it, right? And at the end of the day, we believe in a hybrid cloud scenario still, right? You will have things in your private environment, and especially for big companies who already moved a lot or everything into public cloud, say, get a lot of out now to private cloud back, but still workloads will stay in the public cloud, right? And this hybrid scenario is still active, but we see more and more coming into the private cloud environment.

Nick Patience: 

Yeah, very much so. It's a hybrid world. But it's been really interesting talking about the modern private cloud approach, and that feels like a good place to leave it. So thank you very much for your time, Lars. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time, Nick.

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