CloudFest 2026: Why control and transparency are reshaping cloud infrastructure

Rather than being defined by a single announcement, the event reflected a broader change in priorities. Across different discussions, a consistent pattern emerged: the industry is moving from expanding infrastructure to regaining control over it.

As environments grow more complex, control becomes harder to maintain.

This applies across the board, but particularly for MSPs managing infrastructure for multiple customers. Visibility into how systems behave, where data resides, and how components interact is no longer guaranteed – it has to be actively designed.

What was previously abstracted away is now becoming operationally critical. Control is no longer something you assume – it is something you build for.

The flexibility that enabled rapid growth is also what introduces operational challenges.

Multi-cloud and hybrid environments are now standard, but they come with integration overhead, cost variability, and increased difficulty in troubleshooting. These challenges tend to accumulate over time, rather than appear immediately.

What many organizations are experiencing is not a lack of capability, but a lack of clarity. Systems have grown, but not always in a way that makes them easy to understand or manage.

This is where the focus begins to shift – from enabling flexibility to managing its consequences.

Regulatory requirements are no longer handled separately from infrastructure decisions.

Instead, they are increasingly influencing how systems are designed from the start. Questions around data residency, jurisdiction, and operational control are becoming core architectural considerations.

For organizations and MSPs operating across regions, this adds another dimension to the challenge of control. It is not only about how systems perform, but also about where they operate and under which rules.

Infrastructure that aligns clearly with these requirements reduces ambiguity and makes environments easier to govern over time.

Sustainability continues to be an important topic, but the discussion has become more grounded.

There is less focus on general commitments and more attention on how infrastructure actually operates–how energy is used, how efficiency is achieved, and whether there is a tangible impact beyond reporting.

For providers and MSPs, this also connects to customer expectations. Sustainability is increasingly part of decision-making, but it needs to be integrated into how infrastructure is built and run.

In this context, sustainability becomes another aspect of control–understanding and managing the real-world impact of infrastructure, rather than treating it as a separate concern.

Taken together, these themes point to a shift in how infrastructure is evaluated.

The challenge is no longer how to access or scale infrastructure, but how to structure it in a way that remains understandable and manageable over time.

This includes:

• Systems that can be reasoned about, not just deployed
• Predictable performance and behavior
• Clear alignment between architecture, compliance, and operations
• Flexibility that does not introduce unnecessary complexity

In practice, this often means rethinking how different elements–performance, sovereignty, and sustainability–are combined, rather than optimizing for them individually.

Control is not only about where workloads run, but also about how they interact.

As systems become more distributed, the network becomes a critical part of how infrastructure behaves. Latency, routing, and interconnectivity directly affect performance, reliability, and the ability to diagnose issues.

Many of the challenges discussed at CloudFest were not isolated to individual systems, but emerged in the interaction between them.

Predictable routing, low-latency connections, and clearly defined geographic paths make infrastructure easier to understand and operate. When data moves through known locations, within defined regions, both performance and compliance become easier to manage.

In a Nordic context, this often means building around tightly connected data centers with direct links to key European hubs. The result is an environment that behaves consistently over time, rather than one that requires constant adjustment.

As control becomes a priority, organizations are re-evaluating where workloads are placed.

Rather than relying on a single model, there is a growing tendency to distribute infrastructure more deliberately. Certain workloads are placed in environments where control, performance, and compliance can be maintained more directly, while others remain integrated with broader cloud platforms.

For MSPs, this is particularly relevant.

Colocation is becoming a more active part of this approach, as it allows providers to retain control over hardware, performance, and data location while still supporting modern, hybrid architectures.

In practice, this often means moving workloads into environments where infrastructure is easier to operate and reason about, such as data centers in Sweden and Finland, while maintaining connectivity to other platforms.

This is not a shift away from the cloud, but a rebalancing of how it is used.

As infrastructure becomes more complex, the way trust is established is changing.

Organizations and MSPs are relying less on high-level promises and more on what can be verified in practice.

This includes:

• Clear visibility into where data is stored and under which jurisdiction it operates
• Measurable and predictable performance
• Sustainability that is reflected in actual operations
• Systems that can be understood without unnecessary complexity

Transparency becomes central—not just as visibility, but as a way to reduce uncertainty. When infrastructure behaves predictably and decisions are easier to understand, it becomes easier to trust.

CloudFest did not revolve around a single defining announcement.

Instead, it reflected a shift in priorities.

The industry is moving from a phase focused on expansion and flexibility toward one focused on control and long-term sustainability. Organizations and service providers are placing greater emphasis on understanding their environments, making deliberate architectural choices, and reducing unnecessary complexity.

The cloud has enabled a level of flexibility and scalability that fundamentally changed how technology is built and delivered.

However, as systems mature, the requirements are evolving.

There is a growing need for infrastructure that provides clarity, supports control, and remains stable over time – not as additional features, but as fundamental characteristics of how it is designed and operated.

For many organizations and MSPs, this also includes reconsidering where infrastructure runs. Environments that offer clear legal frameworks, predictable performance, and integrated approaches to sustainability are becoming more relevant as decision-making becomes more complex.

This is part of why Nordic infrastructure is increasingly part of the conversation – not as a positioning statement, but as a practical response to these requirements.