8 reasons why IT leaders are embracing cloud repatriation

1. Optimize Costs

For IT leaders seeking to reduce cloud spending, the allure of lower-cost, self-operated infrastructure presents a compelling alternative. As they look to minimize hidden fees and eliminate unpredictable cloud costs, they identify inefficient workloads and adjust strategies to enable more cost-effective options.

The process entails reassessing application placement to achieve the right balance between resource consumption and service delivery. Hybrid strategies -- which consist of on-premises deployments, private cloud, as-a-service options and colocation options -- offer the granular control missing from public cloud. However, as C-suite and IT leaders move toward repatriation, they also need to consider the upfront costs for hardware and managing physical infrastructures, ensuring long-term ROI.                                   

2. Right-size deployments

Highly predictable workloads with steady resource demands can deliver the best performance on-premises. On the other hand, data-intensive workloads accrue significant transfer fees in the cloud. Moreover, cloud-based applications that don't require scaling lead to wasted investments. An effective infrastructure strategy will evaluate application placement based on three parameters:

• Predictability.
• Data gravity.
• Compliance standards.

If the compute and storage demand is constant over time, local on-premises resources can deliver value at a fraction of the cost of cloud hosting.                       

3. Adhere to security and compliance requirements

Strong privacy controls and regulatory compliance remain critical benchmarks. Organizations in key sectors are seeking to enhance data control and ensure a level of security that public cloud platforms cannot match.

The goal for businesses across diverse sectors, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing and ecommerce, is to assess whether the required protection levels can be better achieved through on-premises approaches. For example, organizations can gain more control, expand service customization and ensure security compliance by deploying private clouds.

4. Pursue new AI initiatives

The current trend toward AI initiatives and the investments required to finance these adoptions have prompted C-suite leaders to question whether every app in the cloud is worth its cost, prompting them to recalibrate their cloud deployments in the process.

In terms of AI, they're choosing to use managed services for non-critical workloads, retain data to meet compliance and train AI models in private clusters. To further emphasize the importance of repatriation and the drive towards AI, Flexera's survey shows 70% of organizations are adopting hybrid cloud strategies.

5. Avoid vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in results from over-reliance on a single cloud provider's proprietary technology, limiting an organization's service flexibility and expansion. In an ideal cloud scenario, organizations have as many compute and storage options as possible under their control.

However, for today's always-changing, innovation-focused IT environments, cloud services can pose key financial risks. In terms of inefficient, overpriced workloads and service charges that are incompatible with a company's business model. Second, enterprises risk losing their competitive advantage through service and product deprecation, compelling them to significantly change their business models in midstream.

6. Increase private cloud orchestration

Organizations are repatriating workloads on-premises and combining them with automation, standardization, and self-service capabilities to achieve public cloud-like agility. The trend requires experienced operations teams and tooling – such as IaaS, containers and analytics -- integrated with a public cloud service to create a hybrid environment. Along with dynamic scaling in real time, enterprises achieve better performance at lower cost while exerting greater control over data and distributed applications.

7. Compensate for lack of IT skillsets

In terms of managing cloud environments, it's essential to train in-house IT teams on best practices. For example, skill gaps in managing cloud-based apps can lead to security and performance issues. Moreover, if IT teams lack visibility into properly monitoring cloud usage and costs, they can seriously jeopardize business operations.

To compensate, administrators can compare current cloud spend with the potential costs of maintaining private cloud services through a detailed cost-benefit analysis. They can evaluate the potential of repatriation by contrasting indirect costs, such as training and upskilling for cloud operations with in-house management of new, possibly more complex on-premises deployments.

8. Require consistent availability

Organizations with public cloud deployments can experience application latencies. That’s due to the distributed nature of public cloud environments and network partitions that create trade-offs between operational consistency and high availability.

Businesses use repatriation to regain more responsive service delivery, particularly for high-throughput workloads. Achieving these on-demand response capabilities is critical for companies that depend on real-time data, including finance, healthcare, transportation and manufacturing.

Repatriation trends across sectors

For businesses with data-intensive processes, relying on cloud for all application deployments has become an increasingly expensive proposition, particularly at scale, when ingress/egress, over-provisioning and licensing costs are factored in. Hybrid cloud offers important advantages to overcome these deficits.

Finance. Meeting regulatory compliance requires a high degree of control to monitor real-time transactions, ensure regulatory conformance and protect against fraud. Both online banking and equities trading manage sensitive personal data on-premises with strict privacy controls while using public cloud-based analytics to detect anomalies and suspicious activity or to handle massive transaction streams in real time.

Healthcare. Hospitals use a similar model to conduct medical imaging and analysis. They employ the scalable resources of public cloud, combining machine learning and AI to detect health abnormalities while actual imaging is performed locally and data stored on-premises to conform to HIPAA regulations.

As AI adoptions take precedence and organizations redouble their security and compliance efforts, hybrid cloud offers a tactical approach to further optimize IT infrastructures. In the interim, cloud repatriation shows no signs of abating.

Kerry Doyle writes about technology for a variety of publications and platforms. His current focus is on issues relevant to IT and enterprise leaders across a range of topics, from nanotech and cloud to distributed services and AI.