You’ve probably heard that 83% of CIOs have plans to bring workloads back from the public cloud this year. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s returning to an old-school, on-prem approach – in fact, fewer than 10% of those moving workloads plan to go fully on-prem.
The cloud repatriation movement we’re seeing right now is largely a movement of “going hybrid”: shifting from an all-in public cloud position to a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and co-located hosting, typically with the support of a managed services partner.
If you’re considering a shift to hybrid, consider this your primer. Whether you did a spit take looking at your latest AWS invoice or are just curious about what the “hybrid cloud” and “cloud repatriation” buzz is about, you’ll walk away from this with a clear sense of what it all means for your business and what your next step should be.
What Exactly Is Cloud Repatriation?
Another way to think about the cloud repatriation we’re seeing today: it’s a commonsense approach to cloud strategy. It involves matching the right workload to the right environment.
For example, the public cloud is an excellent place to pilot new AI functionality. But once you bring that workload into production, it’s often less beneficial to keep it in the cloud. Why? Because in the public cloud you’ll…
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Pay a premium for the access to hyperscale you no longer need; and
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Be restricted to the components available in public cloud environments, which will prevent you from dialing down the last 20-40 of your solution to get it pitch perfect.
In other words, once a workload has reached a steady state, it often makes sense to transition it out of the public cloud so you can enjoy cost savings, greater flexibility, and greater scalability. None of this is likely shocking to you. So why are we talking about it now?
Data Centers Have Evolved – And Cloud Strategy Should Too
There are two main reasons so many IT executives are bullish about cloud repatriation today:
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The rise of AI has caused public cloud bills to soar for organizations running their AI workloads in the public cloud.
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Today’s data centers can do more than they could a decade ago.
One way to think about the shift is with a housing metaphor:
Owning a datacenter is a bit like owning a home: you have to make a large upfront investment, you’re responsible for all repairs and maintenance, and you own the physical structures within (furniture / servers). Similarly, homeowners need insurance in case anything goes wrong; those with on-prem datacenters need employees with specialized skills.
Hosting workloads fully in the public cloud is a bit like living at the Four Seasons. The Four Seasons provides all furniture and services, from maintenance to laundry; the public cloud furnishes servers, datacenters, applications, etc.
But if you want to get more from your Four Seasons experience — say, host a party – costs scale quickly and dramatically. There isn’t much room to customize. The same is true for the public cloud. Both are very convenient but expensive at scale.
The middle ground that’s possible thanks to today’s technology (including collocation and managed use of both private and public clouds) is akin to renting an apartment with upscale amenities (a pool, a gym, a doorman, etc.).
In this housing setup, upfront costs are lower. You’re not responsible for maintenance, repairs, or ongoing building management. And you have full control over and ownership of the furniture.
In a hybrid infrastructure setting you’re responsible for purchasing servers, but you can run them in the datacenter your way.
What’s more, the datacenters available to the modern-day “renter” have more to offer than the ones you might have encountered a decade ago.
For example: today’s data centers let you take advantage of new third-party and open-source tools (like Terraform and OpenTofu) for IaC (Infrastructure as Code) capabilities anywhere. They have digital tools that can support automated deployment and configuration management, among other things.
Today’s repatriation isn’t a question of build versus buy. It’s a question of finding a way to get the best of both worlds by curating your use of the public cloud, private cloud, and co-located solutions with the help of a managed service provider.
And the benefits go well beyond the savings you’ll almost certainly enjoy on your monthly invoices.
How a Commonsense Cloud Strategy Drives Growth
The right hybrid cloud setup is an essential part of positioning an organization for growth.
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll use an example: We worked recently with an AI-based talent acquisition software company. They’d designed their primary AI use case to use compute powered with GPUs on top of AWS.
While that let them experiment easily, they ended up with a limited set of options. What’s more, they were dramatically overspending and not using the optimized GPU cards that would deliver the optimal performance for their use case.
They decided to move to an environment that we helped them set up and that we manage for them. It involves GPU cards and equipment that are highly performant for this use case and have a cost profile that suits it much better.
So essentially, we helped them achieve workload-environment fit. And not long ago, thanks to the backbone of their successful hybrid cloud platform, they raised several hundred million dollars to build out the rest of their commercial business.
That’s not an edge case. For today’s IT leaders, finding the right cloud infrastructure will be a defining strategic decision. Creating and maintaining the right hybrid cloud environment for your business will be a core part of what enables your next phase of growth.
Strategic IT Leaders Need to Own Their Cloud Journey
If you’re considering repatriation as part of your larger cloud strategy, the first step is to ask whether your current cloud setup aligns with your business goals, starting with workload management. If not, the next step is to consider how a different infrastructure might better support those goals.
If you don’t have the experience or capacity to do this on your own, now is an excellent time to seek the support of a partner who can build, manage, and optimize hybrid cloud environments tailored to your organization’s needs.
Doing so will position you not only as a strategic leader in the long term, it can also make you almost instantly more popular with the CFO. But remember: the benefits go beyond cost savings. Having the right workloads in the right environments will provide the infrastructure necessary to support and sustain your organization’s next phase of growth.