What Is Cloud Repatriation? — 5 Contributing Factors

The cloud will not retract, but hybrid strategies are gaining momentum and on-premises infrastructure and applications are anything but dead.

IT organizations have been rethinking the cloud. According to IDC, half of public cloud applications are moving to private cloud and non-cloud infrastructure, 80% of which say they are bringing some workloads back on-site. For all their advantages, hyperscale providers and other public cloud options are not silver bullets capable of eliminating every technology challenge. After years of accelerating cloud transitions, the market is seeing something of a balance emerge between cloud adoption and repatriation to the on-premises data center.

What Is Cloud Repatriation?

Cloud repatriation is the act of moving workloads from public clouds to a different location (whether that is on-prem, colocation, or private cloud). Without the right strategy, cloud workloads could save on physical infrastructure costs but lead to higher than expected usage costs that outweigh any savings.

The issues driving the public cloud pull-back are familiar: security, performance, and cost. There is increasing recognition that some workloads simply don’t make sense in the cloud. Another key indicator of likely repatriation is application interdependency. Playing well with others seems to be easier at home.

5 Reasons for Cloud Repatriation

Here are five leading factors driving enterprises of all sizes to move workloads back home.

1.Security

There is a (correct) perception that hyperscale public cloud providers present huge targets for cybercrime. At the same time, more stringent regulations regarding data privacy and protection are leading enterprises to carefully consider risk. With more sophisticated security technologies becoming more accessible and affordable, on-premises solutions can frequently lock down proprietary information as well as the elite cloud providers.

2. Performance

Nearly all cloud deployments “an astonishing 98%” experience performance issues, with nearly half having problems at least weekly. High-profile outages have also become more common, making some IT leaders less inclined to view the public cloud as the sole answer for uptime. With hyperconverged and increasingly composable infrastructure coming on line, some data center operators believe they can outperform the cloud.

3.Cost

Michael Dell called it: predictable workloads are cheaper at home. As on-premises data centers become software defined and increasingly autonomous, there isn’t the same urge to outsource management headaches. Cloud-based data storage, in particular, is expensive. And once you apply analytics and AI to all that information, it often makes sense to keep these functions on-site.

4.Interdependency

A cloud pain point for many organizations is application interdependency, and some experts rate this issue as the top driver of repatriation. Some IT leaders are finding that it’s easiest to make the pieces fit when most or all elements remain on-premises.

5.Edge

Organizations with edge aspirations are likely to look beyond today’s public cloud options because of data volume and latency issues. Although it’s unclear exactly what edge models will win out in the market, the centralized public cloud will face new competition in 2020 and beyond.

The cloud will not retract, but hybrid strategies are gaining momentum and on-premises infrastructure and applications are anything but dead. Cloud repatriation is simply another contributor to increasing infrastructure complexity enterprise IT must manage. If you’re looking for a way to simplify your IT operations, explore our server management and monitoring services today!