Mark Boost is the Founder and CEO of Civo, a pioneering cloud platform focused on delivering high-performance, cost-efficient, and developer-friendly infrastructure. With over two decades of leadership in the technology and hosting industries, Mark has built and scaled multiple successful businesses, including LCN.com, one of the UK’s largest web hosting companies, before leading Civo’s mission to disrupt the cloud computing market.
At Civo, Mark is committed to making cloud computing faster, simpler, and more accessible, championing a developer-first approach while challenging the dominance of hyperscalers with transparent pricing and customer-centric innovation. Under his leadership, Civo has introduced several innovative solutions, including its Cloud GPU offering, RelaxAI, an open-source sovereign AI assistant, and Flexcore, a complete private cloud solution.
What factors are driving enterprises to shift workloads from public to private cloud environments?
For years, public cloud was the default choice for enterprises looking to scale. But today, many businesses are reassessing their cloud strategies, driven by concerns over cost, security, and control.
One of the biggest factors behind this shift is cost unpredictability. While hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer scalability, enterprises are increasingly facing the reality of rising egress fees, fluctuating pricing models, and the growing expense of long-term cloud usage. Private cloud, on the other hand, provides a more stable and controlled cost structure – allowing businesses to optimise resources while avoiding hidden charges.
Data sovereignty and regulatory compliance are also top of the agenda for scaling businesses. Governments worldwide are tightening regulations around data privacy and residency, with GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and emerging AI regulations adding new layers of complexity. Public cloud providers, with their globally distributed data centres, often lack the granular controls enterprises need to meet these evolving requirements. Meanwhile, private cloud alternatives ensure that businesses have complete control over where data is stored and who has access to it.
What key factors should enterprises consider when deciding whether to adopt a private or hybrid cloud strategy?
For enterprises evaluating their cloud strategy, the decision between private, hybrid, or multi-cloud comes down to workload flexibility, security needs, cost control, and regulatory compliance. Civo’s latest research shows that 85% of organisations plan to increase private cloud spending over the next 18 months, with 38% expecting significant investment growth.
Private cloud is best suited for businesses that need full control over their infrastructure – particularly those with strict compliance requirements or predictable workloads.. It ensures security, data sovereignty, and cost transparency while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Hybrid cloud, on the other hand, allows enterprises to balance their workloads across public and private environments. It’s ideal for companies that want to keep sensitive data in a secure private cloud while still leveraging the scalability of public cloud services for on-demand capacity or less critical workloads.
While there has long been talk of the “holy grail” of true multicloud strategies, in reality, most businesses remain locked into a single provider. The fundamental issue with multicloud is the complexity of managing disparate cloud environments with different APIs, billing models, and security protocols. The lack of standardisation across cloud providers makes true interoperability difficult, and the additional overhead often outweighs the perceived benefits. The vision of seamless multicloud is still a way off, so, at Civo, we’re focused on providing a cloud experience that gives businesses the flexibility and ownership they’re looking to achieve with multicloud but without the unnecessary complexity.
Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution – businesses need a cloud strategy that aligns with their operational goals, regulatory requirements, and long-term cost considerations.
With the increasing regulatory scrutiny on data sovereignty, how are private cloud solutions evolving to meet multi-jurisdictional compliance requirements without sacrificing scalability?
The days of blindly trusting hyperscalers with your most sensitive data are over. Enterprises are waking up to the fact that they need more control – whether it’s to comply with stricter data sovereignty laws or to ensure their infrastructure remains resilient and secure.
At Civo, we’ve built FlexCore to give businesses the best of both worlds: full control over where and how their data is stored, without compromising on the scalability and ease of use they’re used to with public cloud. FlexCore ensures businesses get the same seamless experience on private cloud as they would on Civo’s public cloud, eliminating the typical trade-offs associated with private infrastructure. Unlike traditional private cloud setups that are slow and complex, Flexcore is designed for speed, flexibility, and compliance from day one.
We’ve made it possible for businesses to deploy private cloud infrastructure in a location of their choice, ensuring compliance with regional data regulations like GDPR in Europe or CCPA in California – without sacrificing performance. And because Flexcore integrates easily with major public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, businesses don’t have to abandon their existing cloud strategy. They get sovereignty, security, and scalability all in one package.
FlexCore is positioned as a plug-and-play private cloud – how does this simplify adoption for businesses that lack cloud expertise?
Private cloud has often been seen as something only large enterprises with dedicated infrastructure teams can manage. Setting it up traditionally required months of planning, complex integrations, and a team of specialists to keep everything running. But that’s not realistic for many businesses today – especially those that need to move fast and focus on delivering value to their customers rather than managing infrastructure.
With FlexCore , we wanted to remove those barriers. It’s designed to be easy to deploy and operate, so businesses don’t need deep cloud expertise to get started. The hardware and software are pre-integrated, so instead of a long, complicated setup, organisations can have a private cloud environment running in minutes. This makes it accessible not just for enterprises but also for smaller teams that want more control over their infrastructure without the usual complexity.
Importantly, FlexCore delivers the same experience as Civo’s public cloud. Businesses don’t have to learn new tools or workflows; they can simply extend their existing cloud operations to their own private infrastructure. It’s about giving businesses ‘the cloud your way,’ without the trade-offs typically associated with private cloud solutions.
