Some studies have suggested that as many as 85 percent of businesses are considering repatriating workloads to the data center from the cloud. This highlights one of the most important factors for success in the cloud: you need to choose the right applications to migrate to cloud. For many businesses, hybrid IT, rather than cloud-only, is the appropriate architectural decision.

Reasons to Repatriate a Workload

There are high levels of effort required to migrate workloads to the cloud, and in most cases, an equally high effort is required to repatriate to the data center. It’s not usually as easy as rebooting the server that used to run the application. Because of this, repatriation should be considered only when there are real reasons to support it, including:

High cost.

Some businesses have found that cloud doesn’t offer the cost savings they anticipated. Before backing out of cloud for this reason, it’s important to make sure you’re using cloud effectively. Lift-and-shift can result in over-provisioning, resulting in high-cost cloud environments, and poor enforcement of policies such as shutdown at end of day can mean paying for services that are mostly idle. Purchasing reserved instances or spot instances can reduce cloud spending.

Poor performance.

Cloud environments can result in performance problems, and one solution may be to pull them back to the data center. However, there are less disruptive steps that can be taken to improve performance of applications in the cloud.

Compliance concerns.

Although you can meet compliance mandates in the cloud, and many cloud providers offer environments that are certified to meet common compliance standards, some businesses may feel they have more control and can more effectively achieve compliance in an in-house data center.

Reliability issues.

Cloud remains highly reliable, but despite that, numerous businesses have been impacted by cloud outages. Before deciding to move back to the data center, consider ways to build additional reliability into your cloud design, through incorporating multiple regions or multiple clouds.

Achieving Repatriation

If detailed analysis leads to the decision to repatriate workloads to the data center, this needs to be managed as carefully as the migration to the cloud. Repatriation is effectively a reverse migration, with all the initial considerations plus additional concerns.

Even if you’ve preserved the necessary hardware, changes in volume since the application was migrated to cloud means the existing resources may no longer be suitable. If they’ve been shut down, they may not have all the latest upgrades and security patches installed. If the application was refactored to suit the cloud, it may need new changes to fit in the data center, or you may need to deploy a new private cloud to preserve the architecture.

In addition, there may be costs to getting your data out of the cloud; it’s common for upload to be free which downloads are charged according to size.

If your cloud architecture isn’t working for you, Prescient Solutions can help you determine whether it’s better to make changes in the cloud or rehome your applications to the data center. Contact us to learn how our cloud services and managed technology services offer the best technology solutions in the cloud and on premises.