Public internet or private dedicated connectivity? The right answer depends on what your workloads need, what your compliance obligations require, and what you need to be able to evidence. This guide covers the key considerations.
Most organisations now run meaningful workloads in cloud. The question of how to connect to them is often treated as a secondary consideration, resolved by whatever was simplest at the time the workload was deployed. For many workloads, that is fine. For others, it is where problems start.
There are two principal methods for connecting to cloud environments: public internet and private dedicated connectivity. Understanding the differences, and when each is appropriate, is useful for any organisation planning or reviewing its cloud connectivity estate.
Using the public internet as the path to cloud is the simplest and most common starting point. Most organisations already have internet connections in place, making it easy to route cloud traffic over them without additional procurement or infrastructure.
For low-priority workloads, SaaS applications, and services where occasional latency or packet loss is tolerable, internet connectivity is often entirely sufficient. The cost is low, setup is straightforward, and it scales with the organisation’s existing internet capacity.
The limitations become relevant as workloads become more critical or more sensitive.
The internet is a best-effort network. It carries no service level agreement and offers no quality of service guarantee. Traffic takes whatever route is available at any given moment, which can mean variable latency, occasional packet loss, and performance that degrades during periods of congestion. For real-time applications, large data transfers, or workloads where consistent throughput matters, this unpredictability is a material risk.
From a security perspective, traffic routed over the public internet is exposed to a broader threat surface than traffic on a private network. VPN encryption protects data in transit, but VPNs introduce their own performance constraints, particularly at volume. Organisations running business-critical applications over VPN tunnels often find that performance becomes a limiting factor well before security does.
For regulated organisations, the compliance picture adds a further dimension. Evidencing what happens to data in transit over the public internet is harder than evidencing a private path where the source, destination, and route are all under governance. Where auditors need to see controls at the cloud boundary, internet connectivity makes those controls harder to document and demonstrate.
Private dedicated connectivity provides a direct, managed path between an organisation’s estate and its cloud environment, bypassing the public internet entirely. The major cloud providers each offer their own private connectivity service: AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect. Where native private connectivity is not available or appropriate, managed IPSec VPN over a dedicated circuit provides an alternative.
The performance characteristics of a private connection are fundamentally different from internet connectivity. Bandwidth is dedicated rather than shared. Latency is consistent and predictable. The path is governed end to end, with telemetry available to evidence performance and SLA delivery. For production workloads, latency-sensitive applications, and large-scale data transfers, the difference is significant in practice.
Egress costs are another consideration. Cloud providers charge for data leaving their environments, and internet egress rates are considerably higher than egress rates on dedicated private connections. For organisations moving high volumes of data between cloud and on-premise environments, the cost differential on egress alone can offset the higher cost of the private circuit over time.
On the compliance side, a private connection is considerably easier to evidence. The path is known, the controls at the boundary are explicit, and change records and access governance can be generated as part of the operating model. For regulated organisations facing DSPT, CAF, NIS2, or DORA requirements, this matters.
The trade-offs are real. Private connectivity costs more to deploy, takes longer to provision than an internet connection, and can be less flexible once in place. Bandwidth changes on a dedicated circuit typically require a contract amendment and a lead time. For workloads that do not warrant it, the overhead is unnecessary.
For organisations connecting cloud environments to regulated networks, the connectivity method is not simply a performance question. HSCN and PSN each carry requirements about the architecture of the connection and the evidence that must be produced to demonstrate compliance. Cloud-hosted products reaching NHS or government customers via HSCN need a compliant path from the cloud environment to the network. That path needs to be designed, governed, and evidenced to the standard the Connection Agreement or Code of Connection requires.
For healthtech and GovTech providers, this is often the point at which the internet connectivity model that worked during development stops being appropriate for production delivery.
AI-enabled applications are creating new pressures on cloud connectivity that did not exist at scale until recently. The data flows between cloud-hosted AI models and on-premise systems are often larger, more frequent, and more sensitive than the workloads they sit alongside. Where an organisation’s existing cloud connectivity was sized for application traffic, it may not be adequate for the volumes that AI inference and training workloads generate.
Governance requirements add a further dimension. The path that data takes between cloud and on-premise systems, and what happens to it on the way, is increasingly subject to the same scrutiny as the data itself. An ungoverned internet path between a cloud AI environment and on-premise clinical or operational data is harder to defend at audit than a private, monitored connection with full change records and boundary controls.
The right connectivity model depends on the specific workload, not on a general preference for one method over another. Some useful questions to work through:
What are the performance requirements of the workload? Latency-sensitive or throughput-intensive applications benefit from a private connection. Low-priority or occasional-use workloads may be fine on internet.
What does the compliance picture require? If the workload is subject to regulatory scrutiny, or if data in transit needs to be evidenced, a private path is considerably easier to defend.
What is the egress volume? High egress volumes can make the cost case for private connectivity even where performance alone does not.
Does the workload need to reach a regulated network? If a cloud-hosted product needs to reach HSCN or PSN, the connectivity architecture needs to be designed accordingly from the outset.
Most organisations end up with a blend of connectivity methods across their cloud estate, using internet connectivity for workloads that suit it and private connections for those that require more. Managing that estate under one operating model, with visibility across all of it, is where the complexity tends to accumulate.
Cloud Gateway delivers managed private cloud connectivity through AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute and Google Cloud Interconnect, alongside compliant connectivity to HSCN and PSN for regulated organisations. For more on how this works, see our Connect to the cloud page or Business Connect: Cloud.
