Why companies are reclaiming ownership of their infrastructure

The emergence of Amazon Web Services, and later alternatives such as Azure or Google Cloud, seemed to be a boon for companies: thanks to these infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms, any company could save itself the hassle of maintaining and accessing its own servers. platforms that are dynamically scalable and adapted to the latest times. What happens is that companies realized it wasn’t worth it.

Repatriation to the cloud. This is the name of a phenomenon that has been observed for several years and consists of something simple: moving out of the cloud and returning to having all services and data located in the local infrastructure. InfoWorld estimates that 25% of UK companies surveyed have already made partial or complete moves in this direction.

Various reasons. Reasons given by surveyed companies for repatriating their infrastructure included security concerns and the high expectations they had for the change. 33% cited this reason, and 24% explained that their goals and expectations were not achieved. Because?

Moving to the cloud isn’t just about moving to the cloud. The truth is that moving to a cloud platform doesn’t make much sense unless you optimize your needs and workload for the cloud. Doing this with old applications and not adapting them to new times or not taking advantage of containers or clustering can lead to something counterproductive, and above all…

Cloud is more expensive. The main reason for repatriating to the cloud was cost: 43% of companies surveyed explained that the initial migration was more expensive than expected. It’s true that the cost-benefit analysis of choosing between cloud and on-premises infrastructure varies greatly from company to company, but many companies chose the cloud believing it would save them money. In many cases this does not appear to be the case.

But there are problems. Companies going back in time to manage their private clouds need to closely monitor their on-premises infrastructure to avoid security breaches, expertly manage services and data, and conduct a thorough analysis of the hardware resources they require. All this requires economic and resource costs, and this must be taken into account in the long term.

Famous case. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Hey and Basecamp, who had his ups and downs with Apple, revealed in October 2022 exactly how they made this decision when they found costs were skyrocketing. A few months later, he explained how the process went, and a little later returned to the benefits they received from repatriating to the cloud. The return movement, at least in his case, was successful.

The world’s AWS and Azure will not be affected (much).. It may seem that the decision of many companies to leave these services will be a major problem for companies like Amazon or Microsoft, but the reality is that they have a bigger prospect: AI, which is leading to countless new technologies. .web services that are hosted in the cloud. And that is not all.

Image | Ismail Enes Ayhan

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