Are Your Infrastructure Eggs in One Basket?

• Rising platform costs are exposing the strategic risk of relying too heavily on a single vendor for core infrastructure 
• Multicloud is not about replacing one platform with another, but creating more choice, flexibility, and control over how workloads evolve 
• Dell Services helps organizations assess their current environment, map realistic options, and choose the right path to stay, partially transition, or move fully based on business goals 

Most organizations don’t set out to put all their eggs in one basket. It happens gradually. A platform proves itself, trust builds, workloads accumulate, and before long the entire IT strategy is sitting on a single foundation. That works fine, until the economics change. 

I’ve been having a version of this conversation with IT leaders across the UK and Europe for the past 18 months. And right now, it feels more urgent than ever. 

The cost pressure is real, and it’s not going away

Many organizations today have built their entire IT strategy around a single platform. For years, that made sense. Consolidation brought consistency, skills alignment, and operational predictability. But markets change, and when a dominant platform vendor shifts its commercial model, the organizations most exposed are those that have placed too much of their infrastructure reliance in one place. 

Enterprise software costs are rising significantly in 2026. Subscription transitions and shifting vendor commercial models are pushing long-term costs higher across the board. For organizations running thousands of workloads on a single-vendor stack, that’s not a line item. It’s a structural problem. 

The reactive response is to negotiate harder, absorb the increase, or defer investment elsewhere. But that’s just rearranging the eggs, not rethinking the basket. 

The strategic response is to ask a bigger question: how adaptable is your organization? 

Why this is driving the multicloud conversation

This is why AI freedom and a multicloud approach are gaining momentum, not as a trend, but as a response to risk. 

It’s not about replacing one platform with another. 

It’s about creating choice. Choice to move. Choice to scale. Choice to evolve, without being locked into one ecosystem. 

Because no business wants to find itself in a position where its infrastructure works perfectly until it suddenly doesn’t. 

But multicloud isn’t a shortcut

There’s also a reality many organizations are now facing: multicloud done poorly can increase complexity, not reduce it. 

Without the right foundations, it can lead to higher costs, fragmented operations, and more pressure on already stretched IT teams. 

The most successful strategies start earlier, with the fundamentals: 

• Clear visibility of the current environment 
• Alignment to business outcomes, not just technology 
• The right operating model 
• Modern, flexible infrastructure foundations 
• A realistic, phased approach to change 

Three realistic multicloud paths

When I sit down with IT leaders who are facing rising platform costs, I don’t start with a product pitch. I start with a conversation about options. In my experience, there are three realistic paths: 

Stay where you are. This might be right for some workloads, or for organizations that have recently renewed and need time to plan. The key is doing this with eyes open, understanding the dependency and the commercial trajectory. 

Partially transition. Offload specific workloads to alternative platforms where the cost or performance case is strongest. This is often the most practical starting point and delivers near-term value while preserving existing investments. 

Move fully to an alternative. For organizations where the commercial model has fundamentally broken, or where flexibility and control are strategic priorities, a full transition to a platform-independent private cloud model may be the right answer. 

None of these paths is inherently better than the others. The right answer depends on your workloads, your contracts, your team’s skills, and your business roadmap. What matters is making the choice deliberately, not by default. 

Where Dell Services comes in

This is where Dell Services comes in. Our Platform Assessment Services aren’t a sales exercise. It’s a structured conversation designed to help you understand your current environment, map your workloads, and evaluate the commercial and technical implications of each path. Stay. Partially transition. Move fully. 

Dell Private Cloud, for example, is built specifically to address this challenge. It offers a hypervisor-agnostic architecture that supports bring-your-own licensing. Dell Automation Platform enables the Dell Private Cloud for automation and integration, making new deployments and lifecycle management much easier to manage and customize for your own needs. With validated blueprints for VMware vSphere, Red Hat OpenShift, and Nutanix AHV, workload-ready clusters can be deployed with zero manual effort, and the modular design means you can scale compute and storage independently. 

The goal isn’t to replace one form of lock-in with another. It’s to give organizations the freedom to manage IT across any multicloud environment, reduce ecosystem dependency, and build infrastructure that’s resilient enough to weather whatever comes next. 

The bigger question

Organizations that use this moment purely to renegotiate a contract are solving a short-term problem. Organizations that use it to rethink their infrastructure strategy are building a long-term advantage. 

The eggs are already in the basket. The question isn’t just how to protect them there. It’s whether that basket is the right one to carry into the next decade. 

I work with organizations across the UK on exactly these conversations, and I’d genuinely welcome the chance to connect with leaders who are navigating this right now. 

Here’s the question I’ll leave you with: Are rising platform costs just a budgeting issue, or a signal that it’s time to rethink infrastructure strategy?

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is a multicloud strategy, and why does it matter now?
A multicloud strategy uses two or more cloud environments — public, private, or both — so you can place each workload where it runs best without depending on a single vendor. It matters in 2026 because enterprise software costs are rising sharply, and organizations running their entire IT estate on one platform are discovering that consolidation has quietly turned into concentrated risk. What once looked like efficiency now looks like exposure.

What is vendor lock-in, and how does it actually happen?
Vendor lock-in is when switching cloud providers becomes so expensive, slow, or technically disruptive that you effectively can’t. It builds gradually: a platform proves itself, workloads accumulate, proprietary services get woven in, and before long the entire IT strategy sits on one foundation. When that vendor shifts its commercial model, organizations discover how little flexibility they have — and how deep the dependency runs.

How does a multicloud strategy help avoid vendor lock-in?
A multicloud strategy avoids vendor lock-in by giving you real choice — the ability to place workloads where cost and performance make the most sense, scale independently, and negotiate from a position of leverage. Roughly 42% of enterprises now cite vendor lock-in avoidance as their primary reason for adopting multicloud. The key is intent: multicloud only avoids lock-in when it’s built deliberately, not when it accumulates by default.

What’s the difference between multicloud and hybrid cloud?
Multicloud uses two or more cloud environments — often multiple public clouds, sometimes combined with private — to place each workload where it runs best. Hybrid cloud specifically pairs a private or on-premises environment with a public cloud. Most modern enterprise strategies combine both patterns under a single governance model, which is why Dell Private Cloud is designed to work inside either.

How do I move away from a single-vendor infrastructure stack?
Three realistic paths exist: stay (with clear eyes on the commercial trajectory), partially transition specific workloads where the case is strongest, or fully move to a platform-independent private cloud. The right answer depends on your workloads, contracts, and business roadmap — what matters is choosing deliberately, not by default. A structured platform assessment is usually the fastest way to figure out which path fits.

What is Dell Private Cloud?
Dell Private Cloud is a modular, hypervisor-agnostic private cloud platform delivered through the Dell Automation Platform. It supports bring-your-own licensing with validated blueprints for VMware vSphere, Red Hat OpenShift, and Nutanix AHV, letting teams scale compute and storage independently and switch hypervisors later without replacing hardware. Dell’s automation delivers workload-ready clusters in about 2.5 hours with minimal manual effort.

How does Dell help organizations build a multicloud strategy?
Dell Services offers a structured Platform Assessment that maps your environment and evaluates each path against your business roadmap. It’s not a sales exercise — it’s a conversation designed to help you make the right call, backed by Dell’s Multicloud Adoption Framework and validated by Dell Private Cloud’s hypervisor-agnostic architecture. The goal is clarity and choice, not migration for its own sake.