Cloud repatriation is gathering momentum – but is it a wise choice?

What do organizations need to achieve cloud repatriation effectively?

News By Stephen Earl published 5 November 2024

In the IT world, repatriation is when businesses bring back their services, applications or data from public clouds to in-house, be it to private cloud or on-premise. After years of companies leveraging offerings from large cloud computing service providers like AWS and Azure, the evidence – both anecdotal and research – suggests the tide has turned and companies are wanting to regain full control.

The Barclays CIO Survey, for example, revealed that the “proportion of respondents planning repatriation rose from 49% in 1H21 to 69% in 2H2”. By 1H24 it had increased to 83%, which is “the highest reading since the survey has been conducted”. Interestingly, storage and databases were the most likely assets to be moved back to private cloud or on-prem.

But why now are companies choosing to repatriate? And how hard is it to do effectively?

Stephen Earl

Head of Product at Cloudhouse.

A costly service running out of power?

One of the key reasons for the move to repatriation is, naturally, cloud cost management. Cutting back on fees paid to service providers has become a necessary step, especially in an uncertain economic landscape. Yet this isn’t the only factor. The hype around the cloud was building so greatly that it too is naturally starting to level off. Why be tied to the cloud with managed services or serverless offerings when you can now run it on your own hardware and have full ownership?

The continuing evolution of cloud services and the methods cloud providers use to expand their services are generating even more costs for customers. This ongoing change to services to match what customers might want and need also means organizations are having to alter how their own services work to make the most of the new provisions – but crucially, without interrogating just how much this will add to their monthly cloud subscription bill. The fear of falling behind by not adopting new products inevitably results in higher cost structures, even when the new services might not be necessary.

But, if using the public cloud is starting to run out of power, what do organizations need to achieve repatriation effectively?

A move requiring careful considerations

Again, cost – and capital investment – is the first item on the agenda. Quite simply, do you have enough investment accessible and ready to go? Cloud costs generally fall under operational expenditure. However, building or re-implementing on-premise cloud is likely to be capitalized and therefore needs to be budgeted for appropriately.

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