High 10 cloud computing tales of 2025

The federal government discovered itself fielding criticism in February 2025, following the publication of steerage by the Division for Science, Innovation and Expertise (DSIT) to public sector our bodies on the way to safely and securely host knowledge in abroad datacentres.

The steerage states that public sector organisations can use cloud companies which are hosted in datacentres outdoors of the UK for “resilience, capability and entry to innovation” causes.

Nevertheless, the recommendation was interpreted by some cloud market stakeholders interviewed by Pc Weekly as being an instruction for public sector consumers to not use the companies of homegrown suppliers whether it is cheaper to purchase them from abroad cloud suppliers.

HM Income and Customs (HMRC) additionally incurred the wrath of the UK cloud market in Could 2025, following the publication of a young doc for the federal government tax assortment company’s decade-long £500m datacentre exit and cloud migration undertaking.

Particularly, it was the undertaking’s size and HMRC’s request for a hyperscale cloud agency to supervise the undertaking that ruffled feathers amongst cloud market commentators, with one claiming the tender could possibly be challenged on authorized grounds for being exclusionary to smaller cloud gamers.

Additional controversy involving this undertaking adopted in October 2025, when Pc Weekly completely revealed that AWS remained the one tech provider nonetheless within the working for the decade-long deal, after the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google Cloud exited the tender course of.

It was claimed by sources that issues in regards to the tender being unfairly biased in direction of AWS had been an element within the suppliers’ choices to withdraw, and HMRC had pushed again on provider strategies to undertake a hybrid cloud setup due to how a lot legacy IT it has.

The UK Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA) ended its long-running investigation into the internal workings of the UK’s cloud infrastructure companies market in July 2025, concluding that Microsoft and Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) had been indulging in behaviours that served to hurt competitors within the sector.

Consequently, the CMA has beneficial that each firms face “focused and bespoke” interventions to curb their anti-competitive behaviours, with its board set to think about this advice in early 2026.

In opposition to a backdrop of geopolitical unrest and issues in regards to the US authorities snooping, the UK’s reliance on abroad cloud suppliers got here into sharper focus throughout 2025, prompting extra thought and consideration from UK IT consumers in regards to the subject of knowledge sovereignty.

Pc Weekly did a deep-dive on this subject in September 2025, drawing comparisons between the UK’s angle in direction of the subject and the remainder of Europe, the place governments are more and more championing using homegrown suppliers.

The dangers concerned with having a lot of the UK’s IT infrastructure hosted in abroad clouds grew to become obvious in October 2025, after AWS suffered a multi-hour outage in certainly one of its US datacentres that affected the output of quite a few UK-based organisations.

Amongst these affected was HMRC and Lloyds Banking Group, with the results on the previous prompting MPs to query what the federal government is doing to make sure public sector entities are protected throughout downtime occasions involving their largest suppliers.

Greater than a yr after Pc Weekly first revealed particulars about Microsoft’s lack of ability to ensure the sovereignty of policing knowledge hosted inside its Azure public cloud, additional revelations on the subject emerged this yr.

Paperwork shared with Pc Weekly confirmed policing knowledge hosted in Microsoft’s hyperscale cloud infrastructure could possibly be processed in additional than 100 international locations, and that the tech big was obfuscating this info from its prospects.

Authorities procurement chiefs on the Crown Business Service (CCS) took the wraps off the fifteenth iteration of the favored G-Cloud procurement framework, kicking off the appliance course of for the buying settlement in October 2025.

Nevertheless, as potential suppliers started to get their heads across the contents of the procurement paperwork, issues started to flow into that the entry necessities is likely to be too excessive and onerous for a lot of small and medium-sized companies to take part within the framework this time round.

A number of months after the CMA concluded its anti-trust investigation into AWS and Microsoft’s maintain on the UK cloud market, phrase broke that the European Fee was planning separate investigations into each firms and their maintain on the continent’s cloud market, below the phrases of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

As detailed by Pc Weekly, the investigations search to confirm if the suppliers needs to be introduced in-scope of the DMA by being designated “gatekeepers” in recognition of how a lot management they wield within the cloud computing market.

This yr has seen the rise of a brand new sort of cloud participant emerge available in the market, within the type of neocloud suppliers reminiscent of Nscale. The corporate has had a curious rise to prominence this yr, having appeared from seemingly nowhere in a single day to seek out itself entrance and centre of the UK authorities’s AI plans.

For the reason that begin of 2025, the corporate has acquired passing mentions in varied ministerial speeches, constructing as much as its CEO, Josh Payne, being quoted in press releases issued by the Division for Science, Innovation and Expertise (DSIT) in regards to the authorities’s bold AI agenda.

The corporate has additionally picked up eye-watering quantities of funding and secured some sizeable tech offers, regardless of solely being in existence since Could 2024.