Cloud repatriation is gathering momentum – but is it a wise choice?

In the IT world, repatriation is when businesses bring back their services, applications or data from public clouds to in-house, be it to private cloud or on-premise. After years of companies leveraging offerings from large cloud computing service providers like AWS and Azure, the evidence – both anecdotal and research – suggests the tide has turned and companies are wanting to regain full control.

The Barclays CIO Survey, for example, revealed that the “proportion of respondents planning repatriation rose from 49% in 1H21 to 69% in 2H2”. By 1H24 it had increased to 83%, which is “the highest reading since the survey has been conducted”. Interestingly, storage and databases were the most likely assets to be moved back to private cloud or on-prem.

But why now are companies choosing to repatriate? And how hard is it to do effectively?

A costly service running out of power?

One of the key reasons for the move to repatriation is, naturally, cloud cost management. Cutting back on fees paid to service providers has become a necessary step, especially in an uncertain economic landscape. Yet this isn’t the only factor. The hype around the cloud was building so greatly that it too is naturally starting to level off. Why be tied to the cloud with managed services or serverless offerings when you can now run it on your own hardware and have full ownership?

The continuing evolution of cloud services and the methods cloud providers use to expand their services are generating even more costs for customers. This ongoing change to services to match what customers might want and need also means organizations…