BlackBox Hosting bets on Everpure and points to growing UK sovereign cloud demand

For much of the past decade, data sovereignty in the UK (and the rest of Europe, in many ways) was a concern for the cautious and the regulated. The hyperscalers made a persuasive case over the past decade - that security, scale, and innovation was provided at a price no private provider could match. Procurement followed the path of least resistance and public sector and commercial buyers alike were pulled into consumption-based models before the implications were properly understood.

However, over the past 24 months or so, we at diginomica have certainly noticed that the mood has shifted. Geo-political tensions have given the abstract concept of sovereignty a very concrete meaning, and the US Cloud Act has moved from vague regulatory concerns to a boardroom priority. BlackBox Hosting, a UK-based managed private cloud provider with 13 years of self-funded growth behind it, thinks that the moment it has been building towards - where data sovereignty is a primary motivation in purchasing decisions - has finally arrived.

Procurement broken, buyers trapped

Matthew Burden, Founder and Managing Director of BlackBox Hosting, has overseen more than 1,500 commercial virtual machines hosted across a range of verticals - government, academic, finance, legal, energy, automotive, film and TV. He has watched the hyperscaler lock-in problem compound over those years, and isn’t shy about articulating where the blame lies. Burden said:

A lot of government institutions…I look at it as the actual procurement being broken. Old-school procurement: if you wanted a server ten years ago, they'd go to tender on that £10,000 server and everybody would tender on it and it would be allocated. The tendering system isn't really geared up for subscription-based services. So the hyperscalers have got subscription-based services into these departments,and you've got AWS architects spinning up hundreds of thousands of services. By the time the businesses and the budgets have caught up, they're already in that lobster trap - very, very hard to migrate out of. And it's been brushed under the carpet for a very long time. 

Justin Field, Commercial Director, joined BlackBox three years ago and has watched the conversation in new business meetings change a lot in that time. He describes potential customers as "frenemies" of the major cloud providers - aware of the alternatives, frustrated by rising costs and absent customer service, but until recently unable to overcome the gravitational pull of the brand names.

Burden points to Moorfields Eye Hospital as an example. Burden recounts speaking to an engineer at the NHS trust, which uses cloud infrastructure for image analysis and AI training. Burden said:

Their cloud provider had given them essentially unlimited GPU resource for training - they're doing a lot of image analysis - and they thought: 'Brilliant, we're getting all this GPU resource for free.' But what they were having to do was upload large amounts of data, these image files, to the cloud, and the storage costs started compounding. They're now paying thousands of pounds just in storage costs for the training data ingestion and egress. The engineers are now saying it would actually have been cheaper to have bought some GPU resource and storage locally and run the training there. At the time it was sold as: 'Look, we're getting free GPU resource, this is great'.

The Cloud Act and why it matters now

The legal backdrop to those questions has also become more important in recent years - the concern of buyers has become clearer. The US Cloud Act, passed in 2018, allows American authorities - including the FBI, NSA, and Department of Homeland Security - to compel US cloud providers to hand over customer data regardless of where in the world it is physically stored. A UK business using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, with data nominally held in a British data centre, retains very little legal protection against that kind of demand.

As diginomica has reported previously, Microsoft admitted during a French Senate hearing that it cannot guarantee data sovereignty outside America under this framework. Google Cloud's CEO acknowledged the need for technical safeguards against potential executive orders that might disrupt EU services. 

The second risk is service disruption rather than data access, and recent geopolitical tensions have made it more real. The assumption that the US and its allies share broadly aligned interests - which underpinned a decade of uncritical cloud adoption - no longer really holds in the way it did (for obvious reasons). And organizations that built their operational infrastructure on US-owned platforms are now assessing what their exposure looks like in a less predictable world.

Field describes what he is now seeing with prospective clients. Field said:

Just last week, a client who's been working on an MVP for two or three years has got to the stage where they're looking to launch, and he's realized that the Cloud Act is potentially going to be an issue for him. It was purely a matter of searching for a sovereign cloud provider, an alternative to the hyperscalers. And it's also an educational piece for him - he needs his hand held through the whole process to make sure he's compliant and meeting all his obligations under GDPR and that sort of thing.

That message is consistent with what diginomica's CIO network flagged in a February 2026 micro-pulse survey, where data sovereignty surfaced alongside legacy systems and general caution as one of the primary barriers to AI adoption. As AI moves higher up the agenda, the infrastructure underpinning it is coming under closer scrutiny. Field, who has been in meetings with DSIT on related issues, said:

You can't have sovereign AI without sovereign cloud. If organizations continue giving everything to Azure and AWS, it won't ever be sovereign. I just find that disconnect very odd.

What sovereign actually means

Burden is clear about what ‘sovereignty’ means in practice - and where he thinks some market claims fall short. He uses the word "greenwashing”. He said:

The big hyperscalers in Europe sell these sovereign clouds, but they're still owned by a US-based parent, so they're still beholden by legislation like the Cloud Act. If push came to shove and the US government wanted that data, they could still extract it out of Europe. You just have to look at what's happening geopolitically at the moment. You don't know what pressure is going to be put on governments from these organisations. Hopefully none, but the risk is there.

For BlackBox, genuine sovereignty means a hundred per cent UK-operated staff, data centres within the UK, and data that does not leave UK borders. Customers can visit the facilities and see where their data sits - something several have taken up. 

Why Everpure

The infrastructure underpinning BlackBox's sovereign cloud proposition is built on Everpure's all-flash storage. The journey there began with ageing HP 3PAR arrays - two full racks per data centre - whose vendor support was ending and whose deduplication and compression performance had deteriorated. BlackBox went to market. Burden said:

HP gave us some options, but one of our tech guys got some information on Everpure - and for the technical specs it just looked so good, particularly the NVMe flash and the way they'd integrated the units. They gave us a quote for basically replacing two full racks of HP 3PAR with just two units, which had me scratching my head, thinking there's no way we're going to get the performance.

BlackBox runs a Hyper-V estate and migrated approximately 1,500 VMs across in three to four months with zero downtime. The results settled the scepticism. Burden said:

We put them in and they just worked. Not only that, but performance increased across all our customers. We're getting sub-millisecond latency even on heavy, mixed workloads - lots of SQL Server, high load - which gives us the performance we've always advertised.

The environmental gain was equally significant. BlackBox went from two full racks of 3PAR down to roughly a quarter rack for all storage, reducing CO2 emissions by 85 per cent and cutting the overall physical footprint by 87 per cent. The X50 and C50 arrays installed in each data centre support in-place upgrades as capacity demands grow, removing a recurring procurement and migration overhead. The company is now managing just under a petabyte of total data, with a 10:1 reduction ratio across the estate - a figure Burden describes as a game changer for capacity planning.

For Field, the practical effect of the Everpure infrastructure shows up in new business meetings. Field said:

When you sit in meetings with heads of IT and CEOs and walk them through our stack, and you mention Everpure, you can almost see their eyes light up. We've always prided ourselves on using the best of the best. Once we've migrated people across, the feedback - from large software companies with massive amounts of data and huge databases - is always about how quickly they can access their data, the disaster recovery side of things, how fast everything is.

That customer experience is reflected in the platform's operational numbers - a 12 per cent performance improvement since migration, storage bottlenecks eliminated, and materially stronger disaster recovery capability across the customer base.

The market ahead

Burden and Field are open about the fact that the UK public sector still lags. Procurement structures make it difficult to route contracts to smaller UK providers, and the dominant position of Microsoft and AWS on the G-Cloud framework - over three quarters of cloud contracts by some estimates - suggests the framework has not delivered the market access it was designed to create for companies like BlackBox.

The commercial sector is moving faster. The Cloud Act, the broader geopolitical backdrop, and a deeper understanding of what sovereignty actually requires - rather than what hyperscalers market it as - are combining to produce inbound interest that simply was not there two or three years ago.

As Field put it, buyers always had reasons to look elsewhere. Now they have a compelling reason to act on them.