From cloud-first to control-first: theCUBE’s SUSECON keynote analysis

Multicloud resilience is no longer a buzzword. As enterprises wrestle with surging AI adoption and mounting compliance pressures, digital sovereignty has become the new battleground for control over infrastructure and data.

That conversation was a top agenda item at SUSECON, where resilience, multicloud choice and AI all emerged as key forces shaping enterprise IT. Open-source infrastructure leader SUSE S.A. now appears to be on a strong trajectory, with a clear roadmap and continued momentum behind platforms such as SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise, according to Steven Dickens (pictured, right), chief executive officer of HyperFRAME Research LLC.

“You look at what they’re doing with virtualization — obviously that market’s being disrupted and people are making strategic decisions,” Dickens said. “I think SUSE’s really well placed to take advantage of that. Strong roadmap for the company, but also the market coming towards them.”

Dickens spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty (left) as part of a keynote analysis at SUSECON 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed digital sovereignty and multicloud resilience amid growing infrastructure complexity and workload portability needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Multicloud resilience in focus

The pressure to build resilient, portable infrastructure has never been greater. Nearly 9 in 10 companies now operate a multicloud strategy, putting vendors that can manage complexity across environments in an increasingly powerful position. As a result, customers are prioritizing optionality, with digital sovereignty and regulations shaping their long-term multicloud strategies. That shift is reshaping how organizations think about workload placement across containers, VMs and infrastructure locations, according to Dickens.

“I think people have gone past, ‘Is it a virtual machine environment? Is it a container environment? Is it a bare metal environment?'” he said. “Then you layer those three different hardware and infrastructure choices over a multicloud strategy — [that’s] too much complexity to manage if you’ve got a different tool or a different environment for each.”

On-premises infrastructure remains a necessary part of the mix alongside cloud environments, particularly in Europe where digital sovereignty pressures are accelerating workload repatriation, according to Dickens. That calculus is increasingly shaped by AI as organizations wrestle with where to place workloads and how to bring compute and data together.

“You’re seeing repatriation of workloads. People are looking at, ‘Hey, do I bring the AI to the data or the data to the AI?’ That’s driving infrastructure choices also,” he said. “You factor all that in. You need a provider like SUSE I think, who’s got all of that optionality and choice.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SUSECON 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the SUSECON event. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE