Plan for repatriation on day one with a hybrid cloud strategy
In the next 2 years, 87% of orgs plan to repatriate workloads off public cloud. Discover how an exit strategy, paired with hybrid approaches, can optimize costs and drive AI innovation.
Although elastic services, rapid prototyping and global scale delivered through cloud services remain in demand, forward-thinking executives should consider repatriation strategies as an integral part of their cloud service adoptions. More organizations are moving workloads back to on-premises environments, but they're achieving operational efficiency and lower costs through a hybrid approach that prioritizes infrastructure control and greater security.
According to "The Cloud Repatriation Shift" survey from OpenText, 67% of respondents have repatriated workloads from a public cloud to an on-prem, private cloud or hybrid environment. Additionally, the survey found that 87% plan to repatriate workloads from a public cloud to an on-premises or private cloud environment within the next two years.
Migrations from public cloud can be both expensive and complex, as well as introduce new challenges related to data security, adequate operational resources and technical depth. For many IT leaders, the focus centers on whether premium cloud prices are justified when legacy or colocation facilities can service reliable workloads at a fraction of the cost. This is when a cloud exit strategy comes into play.
As CIOs reassess whether every app in the cloud is warranted, they're looking to use on-premises, dedicated environments, content delivery networks and even "as-a-service" options for savings, control, privacy and compliance. Optimizing on-premises infrastructure for stable applications not only reduces costs but also improves individual app performance, while ensuring greater workload mobility as business needs change.
Building a repatriation strategy ahead of time can eliminate vendor lock-in, boost platform-agnostic designs in application development and avoid costly mistakes. Additionally, enterprises can sidestep the top barriers to repatriation and avoid concerns about complexities and business continuity during the process. Another motivation for repatriation planning is the growth in AI adoption and budget reallocations to free up financing and resources for specialized components, such as GPUs, networking and storage.
Below, explore key areas of cloud exit strategy that will ease repatriation efforts.
Perform a cloud dependency risk assessment
Preparing for the financial risks of repatriation is a twofold process. It includes assessments of vendor price increases, service discontinuation costs and compliance penalties, as well as performing a repatriation cost analysis. Three assessments enterprises should perform include:
Vendor concentration analysis
For enterprises with multiple cloud workloads, a vendor concentration analysis can uncover over-reliance on a particular CSP and indicate the potential for a single point of failure. Organizations can implement a service portfolio management team or system to decrease the potential for vendor lock-in. With the adoption of FinOps and cloud cost management tools on the rise, the goal is to use data to identify and consolidate redundant services, as well as right-size licenses based on actual usage.
Service mapping
Service mapping provides an additional approach to identify core business applications and assess both the quality of support services and their level of integration. These strategies focus on assessing workload placement based on resource usage, performance, and changing business conditions. They also make existing dependencies between servers, databases and other cloud services more transparent and easier to optimize.
Financial impact modeling
Organizations can go further by comparing their current cloud spend against the potential costs of on-premises or private cloud deployments. Ultimately, evaluating a cloud vendor's financial stability, security lapses, service outages, and operational disruptions can enhance a company's negotiating leverage, mitigate workload migration risks, and ensure business continuity.
Embrace a hybrid approach
Strategizing for a more pragmatic hybrid approach should begin at the outset of cloud adoption. Keep in mind, an on-premises, hybrid approach reflects the need for rightsizing applications and reducing costs, rather than abandoning cloud services. Additionally, according to the OpenText report, 28% of repatriated workloads moved to a hybrid cloud environment.
The following best practices promote portability that eases cloud exits:
- Adopt cloud-agnostic design principles. Key elements include adopting cloud-agnostic design principles. For example, developers can create abstraction layers that mask the complexities of different cloud providers, building applications that can run on any cloud platform and reduce vendor lock-in.
- Avoid vendor-dependent services. Engineering teams should adopt industry standards, avoiding proprietary, vendor-specific data formats and protocols. Processes such as containerization, IaC and service meshes further automate and secure application deployments.
- Negotiate contracts closely. Enterprises can increase their leverage by negotiating upfront with a provider on a suitable exit strategy. IT leaders can also strengthen their bargaining position by selecting a different vendor to serve as a Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) in advance.
As cloud repatriation trends grow and workload mobility becomes normalized, C-suite and IT leaders gain more options to granularly control costs. And a more pragmatic, hybrid approach can go a long way in freeing up enterprise budgets for operationalizing new AI deployments.
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.
