Private cloud hype has been high lately, with telcos in the firing line of new products and services from the leading technology vendors. This reflects the large number of telcos embracing cloudification for various reasons, even if most major tier 1s have set their sails. Factors propelling cloudification include the drive towards cloud-nativeness, deployment of edge compute, migration towards Open RAN, and above all, regulatory pressures to make data more secure and confine its application or analysis locally – the ‘sovereign’ data trend. The latter in particular might seem to mitigate against the alternative of public clouds, although distinctions are not as clear-cut as when cloud computing first emerged around two decades ago in the mid-2000s. At that time, private…