What Is Cloud Repatriation And Why Are Businesses Doing It? A Cloud Report
The public cloud market is growing. In a recent report, Gartner explains that the worldwide public cloud service market is expected to grow from $182.4 billion in 2018 to $331.2 billion by 2022, making anticipated growth over 55%.
At the same time, the IDC Cloud and AI Adoption Survey of 2018 indicates that 80% of customers are repatriating workloads from public cloud environments.
This leads to some interesting questions. How can both of these reports be true? Is cloud repatriation a real thing? And if so, why are companies engaging in cloud repatriation activities? Will they ever move back to the cloud?
Technology analysts have been whispering about cloud repatriation since the beginning of 2018. In February of 2018, Morgan Stanley released a financial report indicating potential growth in the hardware market – predicting double-digit earnings growth in the remainder of 2018.
Besides its rather shocking claim that hardware would see an enormous resurgence – at the time every $1 in revenue growth for the largest cloud service had resulted in about $3 in revenue decline for the major legacy technology companies – Morgan Stanley noted that “one of the biggest detractors of growth hasn’t been the actual migration of computing to cloud, but rather decision-making around the cloud.”
This is precisely why cloud is a disruptor. It disrupted the natural technology lifecycles to which IT leaders had grown accustomed. The prediction by Morgan Stanley coincided with analysts predicting the rise of cloud repatriation.
Those whispers and predictions have become tangible. In some high-profile examples, companies built on public cloud platforms – like Dropbox – migrated back on-premise from AWS, boosting internal growth and hardware sales.
Cloud repatriation describes a shift away from the cloud and back to on-premise infrastructure. The finality of this shift is debatable, as are the motivations for repatriation. For some, repatriation is strategic – and temporary – as businesses seek to optimize their cloud and on-premise environments.
Others, however, are moving back on-premises for more complex reasons, often rooted in ill-constructed migration plans with poorly defined objectives.
As Mark Thiele, Co-Founder and CEO of Edgevana and Executive Director at Edge Gravity by Ericsson, notes, “Cloud is the correct destination for the correct workload at the correct time with the proper organization and ownership plan.”
What is motivating businesses to engage in cloud repatriation? It turns out that a failure to define the business objective of a cloud migration combined with inadequate planning of the migration often leads to disappointment.
In addition, the reality of a cloud deployment is sometimes so far off from what a business leader is promised, or an IT leader expects, that repatriation becomes an escape.
Tim Crawford, strategic CIO advisor and host of the CIO In The Know (CIOitk) podcast says, “The real issue can be pointed to two points: 1) enterprise IT organizations are assuming cloud works just like their corporate data center, and 2) vendor marketing organizations are claiming how easy and less expensive cloud is.”
These foundational misconceptions lead to the cloud repatriation phenomenon we see today.
Migrating to the cloud without proper planning is one of the most common reasons companies experience less-than-ideal results once in the cloud. The increased threat surface area combined with costs attributed to poor migration planning lead many business back to their comfort zone.
“The problem is that the disruption caused by the cloud leaves many businesses playing catch-up. Some jumped head-first to the cloud without doing any of the assessment and planning necessary to make the migration work,” says Mike Czerniak, Cloud Design and Deployment Leader at Mindsight.
“Without purpose or planning, the cloud can be more expensive and less secure.
