About 24% of the organisations indicated that they are planning to move a proportion of their data from cloud to on premise data centres over the next three years, said a report by HCLTech.
The report titled, “Cloud Evolution: Make Innovation a Habit”, said, this process of moving back from cloud to traditional IT estate is called “repatriation” and many companies are planning to do that for a proportion of their apps and workloads.
Quoting Mike Kail, CTO at cloud solutions firm PrimaryIO, it said that repatriation could be a result of clients’ workloads not being optimized for cloud. Kail added, “Repatriation usually happens as a result of workloads being migrated or lifted and shifted to the cloud without optimizing them”.
“You have to optimize your applications and workloads to get the full benefit.” Optimizing workloads requires rewriting or writing new cloud native applications. This suggests that businesses should prioritize modernizing applications over simply moving them to the cloud, suggested the report.
Changing the location of a workload doesn’t provide the same advantages as modernization, which will fully exploit cloud’s security, agility and resilience. Kail points out that businesses need to consider “the return on investment of the agility and elasticity that cloud gives you.” A short-term decision to move workloads from the cloud back to an on-premises environment could have a negative impact on the business, said the report.
Kalyan Kumar, Global CTO and head—ecosystems HCLTech, said, “Repatriation is more of an infrastructure workload conversation—it’s not a business value conversation. If your goal for moving workloads to the cloud is transformation and modernization of business processes, then repatriation is not a viable option.”
He added, “Organizations that haven’t modernized the applications may consider repatriation, because they aren’t saving the money they expected to by choosing cloud as a lower-cost alternative.”
In March 2023, HCLTech commissioned FT Longitude, the research and thought leadership division of the Financial Times, to conduct this survey. “We spoke to 500 senior executives: senior directors, directors, heads of department, C-suite members, board members, senior vice presidents and vice presidents”, said the report.
In another recently released report by Infosys, it was revealed that “only 47% of current cloud commitments are utilized and over $300 billion in corporate cloud commitments remain untapped.”