Cloud Architecture & Connectivity
Cloud Spend Is Moving to Fewer, Larger Agreements
Cloud, networks and telephony sit under every digital service. They are bought through hyperscale providers (very large cloud platform operators), resellers and carriers. In the public sector, G-Cloud spend fell 2.2% to £2.92bn in 2025-26, with AWS leading by a wide margin and spend moving toward value-added resellers. The Government Commercial Agency (GCA) was formed on 1 April 2026, and G-Cloud 15 carries an estimated value of £14bn over four years. These are public sector framework figures, not the whole UK cloud market. Two analyst forecasts for the wider UK market put annual growth at 9.7% and 15.86%, for different periods and market definitions.
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What our briefings cover
Public Cloud and Hyperscale. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), reserved capacity, savings plans and FinOps (the discipline of tracking and governing cloud consumption), including data egress charges.
Hosting, Private and Sovereign Cloud. Colocation, managed private cloud, sovereign hosting and high-performance computing (HPC), as AI workloads reshape capacity demand.
Networks and Connectivity. Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), leased lines, dark fibre, campus Wi-Fi and Network-as-a-Service (NaaS).
Voice and Contact Centres. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), SIP trunking (internet-based telephone lines) and cloud contact centres (CCaaS). Openreach retires the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on 31 January 2027, with about 1.5 million lines still on copper in July 2026, roughly 350,000 of them business premises.
The commercial reality: switching is rarely just a technical decision
Once applications, identity systems and data sit within one provider's services, the cost of change includes re-architecture, retraining and data movement as well as price. Committed-spend agreements bring predictability and, in many contracts, less flexibility if demand falls. Network and telephony agreements add minimum terms and migration dependencies. The telephone deadline compresses decisions that would normally take years into a single season.
Our briefings track the structure of the market as well as its prices: sovereignty and data residency rules, the competition and regulatory attention that large platforms attract, and the length of framework call-offs. The reseller and managed service tier is consolidating, as when Your.Cloud acquired Tamworth-based IT and telecoms provider Pure Cloud Solutions in April 2026, according to Your.Cloud. We look at what that means for buyers who rely on smaller partners, how investors value connectivity businesses, and where value for money sits once the cost of change is counted.
Last updated by Ajay Channana for Ipso Facto on 16 October 2026