Are Organizations Moving from Cloud to On-Premises? AWS Says Yes; Gartner Says It's Not Widespread
And just last month the company Puppet published "Cloud Repatriation: Examples, Unpacking 2024 Trends & Tips for Reverse Migration," which presents both sides of the debate: "Cloud repatriation can reduce long-term cost and enhance security, but it can also increase complexity and cost more in up-front fees."
Also, just about the same time as the AWS comments were publicized, the company Mirantis published "Cloud Repatriation: Key Benefits and Essential Steps."
Clearly certain vendors are backing cloud repatriation and would like you to think it's widespread, but at least one independent research firm has thrown cold water on that.
Gartner in April published "Moving Beyond the Myth of Repatriation: How to Handle Cloud Project Failures." Two of its key findings include:
- On-premises vendors are driving a false narrative of widespread and common "cloud repatriation," in which applications are returned from cloud services to traditional data centers and infrastructure.
- Cloud projects of all size and scope sometimes fail, or are suboptimal, which may lead to a decision to pursue alternatives. Most commonly, the project conception is flawed: the application may be a poor fit for cloud services, the cost or effort estimate might have been inaccurate, or the customer might have had unrealistic expectations.
Gartner has been on this tack for a while now, having way back in 2019 published "The Top 10 Cloud Myths," one of which was:
The idea that workloads are being repatriated from the cloud is primarily wishful thinking on the part of legacy vendors who would benefit from this myth being true. The reality is that most enterprises have not moved cloud workloads back. Of those that have moved, most are not coming from cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but rather from SaaS, colocation and outsourcers.
That is not to say every cloud migration is successful. However, organizations are more likely to address problems as they arise rather than abandon their cloud strategy and move applications back to their original location.
And Gartner isn't alone. Fellow research firm IDC last year published "Larger Organizations Show Greater Activity in Repatriating Compute Resources from Public Cloud," which emphasizes that while some big organizations have repatriation activities, they are typically part of a broader hybrid cloud strategy rather than a full-scale movement away from cloud services.
So take all those news articles about AWS's comments that speculate about a widespread trend with a grain of salt: Cloud spending isn't slowing down anytime soon.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.