A Growing Trend - Workload Repatriation from the Public Cloud

By Timothy SherbakTimothy Sherbak | August 20, 2019

It’s the age of multi-cloud, with enterprises commonly using a variety of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise infrastructure to manage applications and workloads. Organizations today increasingly recognize that the cloud isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. In order to be successful, they need to carefully match their workloads to the environment that they are best suited for. With the mad rush to the public cloud in the last decade, flexibility and agility have been primary drivers. Going forward, other factors are taking hold.

We’ve seen a number of enterprises start to take a step back when it comes to the public cloud. They are beginning to pull some of their applications out of the cloud and return them to their brick-and-mortar data center. Enterprises are increasing investments in private cloud solutions that better meet their security and control requirements.

According to a recent study by IDC, 81 percent of customers reported repatriating workloads from public clouds to an on-premise private cloud, hosted private cloud, or on-premise non-cloud infrastructure, and expects the number to rise to 85 percent in 2019. In addition, the study found that on average, those respondents expect to move 50 percent of their public cloud workloads to hosted private or on-premises location over the next two years. Security issues are driving about 19 percent of that move, performance issues 14 percent, and cost issues 12 percent.

In addition to security and performance, we’ve seen a few additional drivers for cloud repatriation. For example, IDC found that younger organizations are significantly more likely to repatriate public cloud workloads than those that have been in business for 25+ years. Culture is also a strong determinant of repatriation according to IDC. Companies that describe themselves as “market disruptors, market makers, under reinvention or transitioning” have the highest rates of repatriation.

However, companies deploying true hybrid cloud capabilities have some of the lowest rates of repatriation, as they have the ability to run a single application across multiple cloud environments and do not need to move workloads at the same rate as organizations without automation.

Wherever your organization is in your cloud journey, we understand that the public cloud isn't always the best solution for certain workloads and applications. We believe that organizations should be able to move applications wherever maximum cost, performance and security benefits can be achieved -- and we’re happy to help every step of the way. To learn more about Markley’s data center, cloud, and connectivity offerings, please reach out to us at info@markleygroup.com