In a recent webinar, DataBank’s cloud team examined the market forces reshaping enterprise infrastructure decisions and made the case for why a choice-based cloud strategy now represents the most resilient path forward. Watch the full webinar here.

Something shifted in enterprise IT over the past two years that goes beyond a typical market cycle. Equipment costs have risen three to four times in the span of roughly four months, VMware licensing has gone from a stable line item to a budget-breaking variable, and the hyperscaler bills that organizations once accepted as the price of flexibility are now drawing hard scrutiny from finance teams who want to understand what, exactly, they are getting for the spend.

The disruption is real, but what makes this moment particularly difficult for IT leaders is not just the increased cost. It is that the pressure has arrived without a clear resolution in sight, leaving organizations to navigate a complex set of strategic and operational questions that most were not expecting to face on this timeline.

DataBank’s cloud team recently examined both dynamics in depth and demonstrated why choice is now the most effective cloud strategy. The full webinar is available as an on-demand replay.

The Default Approach Stopped Working

For most of its history, VMware was the default answer to enterprise virtualization, not always because organizations made a deliberate choice but because it was so deeply embedded in infrastructure, integrations, and institutional knowledge that it functioned more like assumed infrastructure than a vendor relationship. Deep third-party support, a mature ecosystem, and a generation of IT professionals trained on its platforms reinforced that position year after year.

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023 changed the terms of that relationship in ways most enterprises were not prepared for.

The transition from perpetual licenses to a per-core subscription model, combined with the consolidation of VMware’s reseller program, sent licensing costs sharply higher for organizations that had built their infrastructure around a pricing model they expected to remain stable. What had been a known, manageable cost became an unpredictable one, and in some cases, a prohibitive one.

That shift arrived alongside an unrelated but equally disruptive spike in equipment costs. Hardware that enterprises refreshed on predictable cycles is now three to four times more expensive than it was just months ago, and the math that once validated on-premises infrastructure, colocation strategies, and hyperscaler commitments no longer holds in the same way.

More Than a Cost Problem

While cost pressure gets the bulk of the attention, it is not the whole story. What makes this moment genuinely difficult for IT leaders is that the disruption has no obvious resolution. Today, enterprises are wrestling with a wide range of unresolved questions:

• Whether moving workloads off hyperscalers will actually reduce costs, or simply swap one set of tradeoffs for another
• How to evaluate alternative hypervisor vendors — Nutanix, Proxmox, KVM-based options, Hyper-V — without lab environments to test them against production workloads
• How to rationalize OpEx versus CapEx decisions when neither model carries a clear advantage
• How to address security and compliance requirements that add complexity to every platform conversation

Through all of it, enterprises are trying to avoid deepening the vendor lock-in that created their current exposure. Yet it’s important to note that doing nothing is not a neutral position. It means continuing to absorb rising licensing costs and escalating equipment expenses while the window for proactive planning slowly closes.

Those concerns were reflected during the webinar, where a live audience poll asked attendees to identify their top cloud-related challenge. Rising infrastructure costs, hypervisor licensing increases, and security and compliance pressures all tied for the top spot.

Choice ensures the right platform for every workload, without compromise, where your performance needs, licensing impacts, support models, budget expectations, and future scaling plans all align.

Choice Is the New Enterprise Cloud Strategy

The enterprises navigating this environment most effectively share a common orientation. Rather than making a single large bet on one vendor or one cloud model, they are building infrastructure strategies designed for optionality, placing each workload on the platform where it performs best while preserving the ability to evolve as conditions change.

This is the principle DataBank explored in a recent webinar of the same name. The central argument is that choice delivers lower risk, lower cost, higher control, and no lock-in. More specifically, choice ensures the right platform for every workload without compromise, where performance needs, licensing impacts, support models, budget expectations, and future scaling plans all align.

The era of defaulting to a single hypervisor or cloud model is not over because those models were wrong. It is over because the market has changed in ways that reward flexibility and penalize lock-in. Organizations now need infrastructure partners capable of helping them adapt, not just absorb the impact.

DataBank’s recent webinar breaks down the market forces reshaping enterprise infrastructure decisions — and what a choice-based approach looks like in practice. Watch the replay now.

The Right Platform for Every Workload

The DataBank Cloud platform gives enterprises four distinct options: Multi-Tenant Cloud, Private Cloud, Bare Metal, and FedRAMP Cloud. Across those platforms, customers can mix and match hypervisors — VMware, Nutanix, and Proxmox — based on what each workload actually requires, without re-architecture, disruption, or lock-in.

To illustrate what that flexibility means in practice, DataBank’s team walked through a specific cost comparison during the webinar. An energy company running its entire environment on VMware was spending $18,000 per month. By migrating appropriate workloads to Proxmox while keeping its ERP system on VMware, where the integrations justified the licensing cost, the company could reduce monthly spend to $12,200 — a reduction of nearly 32 percent.

Watch the Webinar

If your organization is wrestling with rising VMware licensing costs, uncertainty about the right cloud direction, security and compliance pressures, or the need to align infrastructure strategy with budget constraints, the webinar offers a practical framework for thinking through each of them. Watch the replay: Choice Is the New Enterprise Cloud Strategy now.

Stay current on the latest thinking around enterprise cloud strategy, infrastructure flexibility, and the evolving hypervisor landscape. Visit DataBank Digest for analysis, insights, and the latest news from the world of colocation and digital infrastructure.