In the last few years, industry analysts have been discussing the phenomenon of companies considering taking their workloads off the public cloud. In fact, a recent argument that market capitalizations of scale public software companies is weighed down by cloud costs, and by hundreds of billions of dollars, caught the interest of several enterprise leaders. By Ravi Kumar, @Infosys.
My own view is that the public cloud is indispensable to digital transformation. It remains one of the biggest opportunity areas for organizations and is practically the only proven way to scale a business quickly and reliably. And yet the approach to cloud that promises most value for enterprises is hybrid — both public and private — leveraged for the right reasons and at the opportune moment in a business’s lifecycle.
Data shows that only a modest number of companies – a 2019 survey by Gartner put that number at 4% — have actually repatriated (or need to repatriate) their public cloud workloads to a private cloud solution.
When the enterprise is significantly cloud-mature and may be looking at optimizing its workload for a number of reasons:
- To lower cost: From an efficiency point of view, it takes the complete automation of operations built atop the cloud infrastructure layers of compute and storage to take advantage of cloud
- Beating latency and improving availability: Public cloud service unavailabilities are rare but can create large-scale disruption when they do occur
- Security comfort: Technology-wise, the public cloud is highly automated for security, which means less human intervention and fewer errors
- Lack of skills: It takes deep skills in the areas of provisioning, cloud architecture, and performance reporting, to name a few, to manage workloads efficiently when running a private cloud
Clearly, repatriation is not a “mass” option, nor the default move at a defined stage of an enterprise’s cloud maturity. Very interesting!
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