VNPT Cloud’s perspective: The competitive advantages of domestic cloud providers as global platforms enter Vietnam

This was one of the issues discussed at the Vietnam Cloud & Datacenter Convention 2026 (VNCDC 2026). In VNPT Cloud’s view, the presence of hyperscalers does not diminish the role of domestic cloud businesses. Instead, the market is entering a stage in which competitiveness will be measured by capabilities beyond infrastructure alone: integration, operations, understanding customers’ systems and meeting Vietnam’s specific requirements.

Competitive advantage extends beyond locally hosted servers

For many years, infrastructure location was a clear advantage for domestic cloud providers. Data centers in Vietnam reduce latency, simplify connectivity and help meet certain data-storage and management requirements.

However, this advantage alone will no longer be sufficient to differentiate providers when global platforms establish infrastructure within Vietnam. Businesses can then access hyperscaler services with better connectivity, lower latency and more options for deploying data domestically.

This does not mean domestic cloud providers lose their competitive edge. Rather, that edge needs to shift from ‘where the infrastructure is located’ to ‘which customer problems the provider can solve’.

With enterprise systems becoming increasingly complex, customers need more than CPUs, memory and storage capacity. They need an architecture that connects multiple environments, operates reliably, meets information security requirements and suits the particular needs of each industry.

Understanding customers’ systems becomes a competitive capability

For large organizations in finance and banking, the public sector, healthcare, manufacturing or retail, cloud migration is rarely as simple as moving an entire system from an existing data center to a new platform.

Businesses first need to determine which applications can move to the public cloud and which systems should continue operating on private cloud or on-premises infrastructure; how data will be classified, protected and backed up; and how legacy systems will connect to the new environment. They must also ensure business continuity throughout the transition.

These challenges require providers to understand both the technology and how the systems actually operate.

Domestic cloud businesses have several significant advantages in this area. Technical teams working directly in Vietnam make assessment, design, deployment and incident handling easier. Communicating in Vietnamese and working directly with IT, information security and business departments also helps bridge the gap between business requirements and technical solutions.

They also bring experience with domestic network infrastructure, Vietnamese enterprises’ existing systems, and the local market’s requirements for processes, contracts, payment and operations.

These factors are difficult to express in the specifications of a virtual server, yet they directly affect the practical implementation of cloud services.

Hybrid cloud is becoming a long-term architecture

Another market change concerns how businesses view hybrid cloud.

Previously, hybrid cloud was sometimes seen as a transitional step: businesses would retain part of their on-premises systems before moving entirely to the public cloud. Today, this model is becoming a deliberate choice for many large organizations.

A business may simultaneously run private cloud for critical systems, public cloud for applications that require rapid scaling, hyperscaler services for certain AI or data workloads, factory infrastructure for low-latency applications, and additional edge locations at branches or production sites.

The challenge is therefore no longer to choose a single cloud platform, but to manage an architecture spanning multiple environments as one unified system.

In this model, domestic cloud providers can expand their role from infrastructure provision to architecture consulting and integration.

This work includes network connectivity between environments, identity and access management, information security, system monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, resource optimization and unified operations.

Without designing these layers from the outset, businesses can easily end up with a fragmented multicloud system: each platform has its own management tools, security policies and operating processes. The benefits of using multiple clouds may then be offset by growing operational complexity.

From infrastructure competition to ecosystem collaboration

The arrival of hyperscalers in Vietnam does not necessarily lead to a competition defined by winners and losers.

Global platforms have advantages in infrastructure scale, service ecosystems, AI technology and investment in specialized platforms. Domestic providers, meanwhile, understand the local market, have established customer networks, can deploy solutions on-site and can integrate with enterprises’ existing infrastructure.

These two sets of capabilities can complement each other.

In a practical architecture, a business may use a hyperscaler’s AI services or specialized platforms while keeping data and some workloads on private cloud or domestic cloud infrastructure. The system may also need connections to existing data centers, edge locations, WAN networks and security platforms already in use.

A domestic provider’s value therefore lies not only in how many servers it owns, but also in its ability to connect different technology environments into an architecture that works in practice.

This is an important shift in Vietnam’s cloud market: from competition based mainly on infrastructure resources to competition based on architecture, integration, operations and service capabilities.

The growing presence of hyperscalers will increase competitive pressure, while also encouraging the domestic market to mature more quickly. For providers such as VNPT Cloud, the opportunity extends beyond defending existing market share to taking a larger role in Vietnamese enterprises’ cloud ecosystems.