A customer walked in sure they wanted colocation. The quote in their head was $10,000 a month. Once Jeremy Pease's team modeled the real requirements, staffing, connectivity, compliance, the number came back at $80,000.
Jeremy Pease is CEO of Aptum, a hybrid multi cloud managed service provider. He joins Max Clark to break down how IT leaders should actually decide where applications run, across public cloud, private cloud, colocation, and bare metal, instead of starting with the platform and working backward.
They get into egress costs that can exceed the infrastructure bill itself, the VMware exodus ahead of the April 2027 contract deadline, why most companies are running workloads at a scale they never needed, and why repatriation almost always requires someone willing to make the unpopular call.
The question isn't whether you negotiated a good rate. It's whether you're on the right infrastructure in the first place.
What You'll Learn
- How to tell if a workload actually belongs in public cloud, private cloud, colocation, or bare metal
- Why egress fees, not compute, are often the real driver of a surprise cloud bill
- What's forcing companies to leave VMware before April 2027, and what it actually costs to stay
- Why "multi cloud" rarely means what the marketing implies
- How to build the ROI case your own IT team can't build for itself
- What a real disaster recovery conversation looks like once the price tag is on the table
In this conversation:
- (00:00) - The colocation quote that changed after the real requirements came out
- (00:53) - Why the application should dictate the infrastructure, not the other way around
- (04:16) - The myth that cloud is automatically more secure or compliant
- (06:15) - Why shared cloud workloads create a real compliance gap
- (08:11) - The five Cs: cost, compliance, customer service, complexity, and visibility
- (09:27) - Gently explaining to a customer that their plan is wrong
- (10:42) - When a board mandates cloud migration without understanding the tradeoffs
- (13:17) - Why small IT teams can't manage what they've been told to run
- (15:03) - Patching still exists in the cloud, just under a different name
- (16:14) - The rise and quiet retreat of the multi cloud pitch
- (20:38) - How much of infrastructure strategy is really about a toxic relationship with IT
- (22:15) - Running infrastructure alone for six of the largest US banks on $130K a month
- (26:25) - Ad tech, real time bidding, and why egress became the real cost center
- (27:13) - Internet connectivity now costs more than the infrastructure itself
- (29:03) - FinOps isn't cost control, it's just explaining the bill
- (31:54) - Why repatriation needs a founder willing to make the unsafe decision
- (32:56) - The cloud spend threshold where a real conversation starts
- (35:44) - Data sovereignty, the US Cloud Act, and owning entities by country
- (37:01) - The EU tiers where US controlled infrastructure becomes disqualifying
- (40:12) - Is data sovereignty the real trojan horse for repatriation
- (43:02) - Aptum's seventy two to seventy five percent average cost reduction
- (43:48) - Walking a repatriation curious customer from first call to signed contract
- (47:13) - Why some staff can't follow the migration to a new platform
- (48:11) - Cloud as the ultimate expression of tech debt
- (50:38) - Why your AWS account team is incentivized to grow your bill, not shrink it
- (52:23) - A CEO's gross revenue cloud spend becoming a business viability problem
- (53:31) - Why finance teams hate the cloud: no control, no predictability
- (55:11) - What people get wrong about disaster recovery in the cloud
- (58:48) - Why dedicated DR instances still cost less than running them live
- (01:00:27) - The real question for any circuit: more or less than $500 a month
- (01:02:12) - Why some customers blame the public internet for problems they chose
- (01:04:33) - The coming skills gap: why electricians are becoming the new high demand hire
- (01:07:09) - Being an expert generalist in a market that rewards niching
- (01:11:01) - Nine hundred and sixty seven vendors, narrowed to eighty two
- (01:13:41) - Controversial take: IT is a solved problem, most issues are self inflicted
- (01:15:32) - Shadow IT and the spreadsheets built because IT wouldn't touch it
- (01:19:27) - VMware's relevance after the Broadcom price increases
- (01:20:39) - The Oracle playbook: raise prices until only the trapped customers remain
- (01:23:19) - What April 2027 actually means for every VMware contract
- (01:25:36) - What percentage of VMware customers actually use its differentiators
- (01:29:31) - Migrating off VMware: where the majority of workloads are actually going
- (01:32:15) - Short executive tenure and who's left holding the decision
- (01:34:19) - The customer who insisted on colo, until the real number was $80K a month
- (01:36:29) - Nobody cares about the technology, they care what it lets them do
- (01:38:10) - Building the ROI presentation the IT team can't build for themselves
- (01:40:44) - Helping IT teams speak board, not just TCO and ROI
- (01:42:49) - Aptum's real ICP: one to three thousand employees, five to ten IT staff
- (01:43:47) - Migration work versus simply needing an expert to run it
- (01:48:01) - Efficiency and specialization: why selective outsourcing wins at scale
- (01:48:46) - Self serve without losing control: automation when they want it, service when they need it
What We Mentioned
Aptum
AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud
VMware (now part of Broadcom)
Broadcom
Nutanix
Proxmox
Zerto
Megaport
Equinix
Digital Realty
Netflix (one of the earliest and most public cloud repatriation cases)
Dropbox
FinOps
EDP (Enterprise Discount Program)
RI (Reserved Instance)
RTO / RPO (Recovery Time Objective / Recovery Point Objective)
DR (Disaster Recovery)
About Jeremy Pease
Jeremy Pease is CEO of Aptum, a global hybrid multi cloud managed service provider. He has more than two decades of experience leading data center, cloud, and managed infrastructure businesses, including executive roles at Hivelocity, Colohouse, DataBank, and Aptum.
Jeremy Pease on LinkedIn
Aptum
About the Show
Signed is the podcast for buyers in a market built for sellers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, sits down with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who've lived inside real enterprise tech deals. New episodes weekly at itbroker.com/podcast.
If you're in the middle of a real tech decision and want someone in your corner, book an intro call at itbroker.com.
Buy tech without regret.
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