Why Smart Infrastructure Teams Are Consolidating Vendors in 2026
For CTOs, infrastructure leaders, and VPs of Engineering, the challenge has evolved. It’s no longer just about accessing capacity; it’s about regaining control over increasingly fragmented technology stacks (especially if you’re seeing the signs you’ve outgrown AWS). Years of accumulating disparate tools and services have left organizations with mounting technical debt, security risks, and escalating costs.
Consolidating vendors onto premium, single-tenant infrastructure is no longer just a cost-saving strategy. It’s a fundamental shift toward building resilient, scalable systems.
The Move Toward Rationalization
The push for vendor consolidation is evident across the tech sector. Market data shows that 75% of organizations are actively pursuing consolidation initiatives, a number that has risen sharply as businesses face economic pressures and reassess operational overhead.
Gartner estimates that by 2027, 70% of organizations will streamline their cloud-native applications to rely on no more than three primary vendors. This shift is a move away from the fragmented “best-of-breed” approach, which often creates more headaches than benefits. Instead, companies are prioritizing deeper partnerships with fewer vendors to reduce complexity and improve efficiency.
The Hidden Costs of Fragmentation
Vendor consolidation also makes financial sense. A fragmented setup often hides costs, such as unused or “zombie” resources—servers and storage provisioned but left idle. Industry analysis suggests 27–32% of cloud spending is wasted on such resources. In a multi-vendor environment, identifying and eliminating this waste is challenging. Consolidation, with a unified control plane, brings transparency and enables better resource management.
To start eliminating this cloud waste, see Taming the AWS Bill.
Real-World Cost Savings
Case studies highlight the financial advantages of moving away from fragmented public cloud reliance. For example, 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, saved $1 million annually by transitioning from public cloud to owned hardware. Similarly, SEO platform Ahrefs found that hosting on AWS would cost $400 million more over three years compared to colocated bare-metal servers. These examples show how the public cloud’s flexibility can become prohibitively expensive at scale for predictable workloads.
For another real-world example, Fleetistics cut costs by 25–30% by moving from Azure to Hivelocity.
Performance and Reliability
Cost isn’t the only reason for consolidation—performance and reliability are just as critical.
Reducing Downtime Costs
For enterprises, downtime costs average over $300,000 per hour for 91% of organizations, with high-transaction environments incurring even greater losses. Multi-vendor setups often exacerbate outages with blame-shifting between providers, leaving customers stranded and engineers scrambling to resolve issues. Consolidating vendors creates clear accountability and reduces downtime. Providers offering direct access to engineers and responsive support teams can significantly lower Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
Eliminating the “Noisy Neighbor” Effect
Public cloud environments often force customers to share physical resources, leading to performance issues caused by “noisy neighbors.” Consolidation onto single-tenant bare-metal environments eliminates this issue, ensuring consistent, predictable performance without hypervisor overhead.
The Repatriation Trend
Repatriation—the migration of steady-state, high-volume workloads from public cloud to dedicated infrastructure—is a key part of the consolidation strategy. This isn’t a rejection of cloud principles like agility or automation but rather a rejection of public cloud financial models for mature workloads. Infrastructure teams are increasingly turning to solutions that combine cloud-like automation with the cost efficiency and performance of single-tenant environments.
See also the synergy between dedicated servers and enterprise cloud.
Streamlining Operations
The biggest cost in any organization is engineering time. Each additional vendor adds complexity, requiring engineers to navigate different tools, interfaces, and processes. This “complexity tax” dilutes expertise and increases the risk of configuration errors. Consolidation allows teams to standardize on fewer platforms, reducing operational friction and giving engineers more time to focus on innovation.
Simplifying Governance and Security
While multi-cloud architectures are often promoted as a hedge against vendor lock-in, they frequently increase governance challenges. Security policies must be synchronized across multiple systems, creating room for errors and compliance failures. Consolidation simplifies governance, making it easier to apply consistent security measures and mitigate risks.
Consolidating with Hivelocity
Successful consolidation requires a partner that strengthens your team rather than adding complexity. Hivelocity offers premium bare-metal servers and colocation solutions, combining top-tier infrastructure with hands-on support. Our single-tenant environments deliver consistent performance, transparent pricing, and the flexibility to deploy servers in 7 minutes. With 24/7 operations support, our team works as an extension of yours to ensure uptime and reliability.
The Future of Infrastructure
The era of fragmented infrastructure is ending. Teams seeking stability, performance, and cost efficiency are embracing vendor consolidation as the way forward. By trading complexity for control, businesses can reduce costs, simplify operations, and empower their teams to focus on innovation.
If your infrastructure has outgrown fragmented cloud models, it’s time to consider a partner who prioritizes your growth. Explore Hivelocity’s dedicated solutions today.
