To the Cloud and Back: When and How to Execute a Cloud Repatriation Effort

To the Cloud and Back: When and How to Execute a Cloud Repatriation Effort

The past few years have been dominated by digital transformation characterized by a move away from legacy on-premises systems to the cloud. However, there are also instances when bringing certain assets back from the cloud – a process known as “cloud repatriation” – can be a strategic and cost-effective move.

Questions persist about when cloud repatriation makes sense and how organizations should craft their strategy.  Let’s explore the top reasons for cloud repatriation, considerations for making this transformation, and how to plan a cloud repatriation journey.

Compelling Reasons for Cloud Repatriation

Despite the many benefits of the cloud, including scalability, ease of provisioning, agility, and security, there are many cases where pulling resources out of the cloud makes compelling business sense. Consider the following reasons to repatriate:

1. Cost optimization

A common reason for cloud repatriation is cost. When applications are moved to a Software as a Service (SaaS) program or a Managed Service Provider (MSP) contract, the associated costs for IT infrastructure, operations, storage, and security may actually be lower than the expenses incurred under cloud enterprise license agreements.

Another important economic factor to consider is the hyperscale architectures that power cloud data centers. While hyperscale costs were consistently decreasing in earlier years, they have now stabilized. This leveling-off coincides with the rapid expansion of new cloud service offerings, which has made it challenging to predict monthly expenses due to the diverse pricing schedules associated with these offerings.

In fact, buying hardware and hosting it in a shared data center is proving more cost-effective in certain cases. Companies that don’t need rapid server scalability are realizing they can invest in powerful private data center computers for the cost of just one week’s cloud spending.

This is confirmed by a survey by Uptime Institute Intelligence which found that one-third of organizations have relocated applications from a public cloud provider to a co-location facility or their own data center, citing high cloud costs as the primary reason.

1. Increased AI workloads and GPU usage

Another important factor in repatriating from the cloud is AI. AI-driven modeling tools require more processing power and GPU usage than the cloud can affordably or reliably provide and are better suited to run on AI-accelerated infrastructure.

According to Dell CEO, Michael Dell, speaking at this year’s Dell Technologies World, using on-premises infrastructure for AI inferencing (aka training data sets) for large language models (LLMs) is 75% more effective than using a public cloud.

Dell explained, “You want to bring AI to your data, not the other way around.” Indeed, Dell noted that driven by inference and data gravity, 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate some of their workloads from the public cloud in 2024.

LLMs are not the only use case that benefit from on-premises infrastructure. Other examples include graphics-intensive tasks such as digital twins, virtual reality suites, and metaverse applications that require deep mathematical and algorithmic processing. These tasks may not work well in the cloud or just simply should not be in the cloud.

1. Business or operational changes

Even if cloud migration made sense a few months or years ago, business conditions or operational requirements may change over time, making cloud deployments obsolete. This can include changes in storage needs, internal policies, licensing, data transfer requirements, or regulatory rule factors.

Other reasons for repatriation may include security concerns, performance issues, compatibility problems, and service downtime.

Considerations for Cloud Repatriation

The above use cases illustrate how cloud repatriation can be a valuable and strategic option for modernization and transformation. To determine whether cloud repatriation is advisable, enterprises should ask the following questions:

1. Where to repatriate to?

Repatriation doesn’t always mean going back to on-premises. In some instances, shifting an application back to on-premises may not be cost-effective. An alternative option is to choose a new SaaS provider or an MSP who can manage the application.

1. Is the cost of the repatriation effort feasible?

When the cost of using cloud services is no longer in line with an enterprise’s key objectives or KPIs, cloud repatriation becomes a viable option. However, careful evaluation is necessary to determine if it can offer additional cost-saving and strategic opportunities.

There are several technical and cost factors to consider before deciding whether cloud repatriation is feasible, including:

• Infrastructure costs for networking, storage, and server equipment required to support in-house data.

• Subscription costs for alternative cloud solutions.

• Operating costs for utilities and staff to maintain an on-premises data center.

• Security costs (application and network level).

Planning the Cloud Repatriation Journey

For organizations navigating cloud repatriation efforts, there’s no blueprint for designing or managing this process. However, going back on-prem doesn’t mean going back to doing it the old way, with disconnected, domain-focused tools and datasets.

Cloud repatriation demands a new approach to adopting and managing hybrid IT investments. More than ever, ITOps teams must ensure that all assets, systems, and processes are aligned and work together seamlessly.

This requires continuous visibility and control over all assets and systems – including when new systems are provisioned, or configuration changes are made – on-premises or in the cloud. Such visibility is crucial for establishing and maintaining a unified view of how the repatriated systems and assets behave across the IT environment.

ScienceLogic: Navigate the Complexity of Cloud Repatriation with Confidence

As organizations move to migrate and reposition IT assets to and from the cloud, none of the business or operational benefits are possible without the global visibility and full-stack monitoring provided by the ScienceLogic AI Platform.

No matter how complex the overall IT estate is, ScienceLogic eliminates visibility gaps, providing a single source of truth in legacy and modern applications and infrastructure.

By combining common data sets from 500+ third-party integrations, ScienceLogic ensures data flows across hybrid IT providing visibility and monitoring across public clouds, AI workloads, GPUs, serverless and microservices-based technologies, virtualization solutions, software-defined networks, servers, storage, IoT, unified communications, and more.

As enterprise IT evolves and assets move to and from the cloud, ScienceLogic ensures seamless operations across all systems – now and in the future – empowering organizations to deliver excellence at every turn of their cloud repatriation journey.