Cloud computing gained popularity for its ease-of-deployment and flexible resource consumption, and while that works for many critical applications, it is not a panacea for every app an enterprise supports. That’s why as cloud adoption continues to rise, some companies are opting to bring workloads back on-premise in certain scenarios.
Eighty percent of respondents to a recent IDC survey report repatriating workloads from public cloud environments. On average, organizations expect to move 50% of their public cloud applications to hosted private or on-premises locations over the next two years, IDC says. The top repatriation drivers, according to the research firm, are security (cited by 19% of respondents), performance (14%), cost (12%), control (12%), and to centralize or reduce shadow IT (11%).
The move from cloud to on-premise isn’t a precursor to reduced use of cloud, however. Rather, it’s evidence of the maturing market and the experience of cloud users.
Now that cloud has been an option for computing for many years, IT departments are seeing its benefits in the right use cases—and realizing when it’s not the right fit. Computing options are not limited to cloud or not: IT organizations can do both, and in 2019, the technology and tools to enable advanced management and orchestration between public and private clouds are more readily available.
“Hybrid is the new normal. Every major public cloud vendor has acknowledged that not all workloads are going to work in the clouds,” says Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager in VMware’s cloud services division. “Customers are going to run workloads where it makes more sense. It is less about public and private; now the pragmatic experience has kicked in. It is not all or nothing.”
