Today, many organizations are operating across multiple clouds. In a recent survey commissioned by Dell Technologies, Vanson Bourne found that 74% of organizations had either fully completed or were making significant investments in multi-cloud environments. These multi-cloud strategies are taking off for many reasons, particularly across the Federal Government.
One of those reasons can be attributed to agencies moving from Cloud First Policy and practices to Cloud Smart with the realization that not all apps and workloads are suited to the public cloud. That’s why cloud repatriation is becoming a more frequent part of the conversation, especially with agencies trying to find the right balance between keeping data, apps, and workloads on premises and in different types of cloud.
The pandemic created even more incentive (along with disruption) to push CIOs and IT leaders to re-evaluate their IT priorities. As agencies prepared to make large investments in technologies to drive cloud initiatives, they started thinking more about business continuity and minimizing operating costs. A recent survey by IDG on post COVID-19 IT spending found that cost control and expense management quickly became the number one concern for CIOs.
As Federal IT leaders consider hybrid cloud strategies and their next cloud investment, cloud repatriation may be a key next step for those that need to transport some workloads off the public cloud to on-premises infrastructure or hosted private clouds.
5 Reasons to Consider Cloud Repatriation
While IDC research from 2019 reveals that 85% of survey respondents considered some form of repatriation, not necessarily everyone made the move. Regardless, cloud repatriation is an important part of every IT leader’s playbook and is necessary when an app’s workload is not suited to the public cloud.
Specifically, here are five reasons why Federal IT leaders would want to consider cloud repatriation as their next step:
1. Escalating costs: Underlying cloud costs can quickly exceed initial expectations, especially when not all apps and workloads are suited to the public cloud. These skyrocketing costs are often due to data egress (where data leaves a network to an external location, i.e. email messages, cloud uploads, or files being moved to external storage) that IT teams may not even be aware of.
2. Lack of workflow strategy: They key determinant for success in any cloud environment is suitability of an app’s workload. Agencies can often encounter problems when they don’t first assess which workloads are best suited to run in the cloud before moving the associated apps. IT leaders first need to take stock of which apps talk to one another and what those data flows look like.
3. Security and compliance: For the Federal Government especially, modern compliance demands, and policies may not be compatible with cloud workloads. Some workloads are simply easier to protect in terms of data due to unique requirements like those in FedRAMP, etc.
4. Availability: For the Federal Government, outages are a big deal. Most public clouds do not offer the same service level agreements (SLAs) as those for on-premises, which means anything on public clouds can’t be guaranteed for uptime. Availability can also depend on how much agencies are willing to pay, such as guaranteeing availability in multiple regional zones, which can get expensive.
5. Lack of skillsets: It’s essential to train in-house IT teams on best practices for standing up cloud environments, whether public, private, or hybrid. Any skill gaps in managing apps on the cloud can cause serious security and performance issues, otherwise. It can also be especially difficult to manage public cloud workloads if IT teams don’t have the visibility to properly monitor usage and costs.
Keeping Cloud Repatriation in the Playbook
Ultimately, a well thought out hybrid cloud strategy provides the most effective means to minimize and control spiraling costs as well as maximize application performance. Combined with assessment services from Iron Bow and Dell Technologies, this is the best way to determine which apps and workloads are best designed for which environment, be it public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises. All these environments have benefits for innovation and cost savings.
Cloud repatriation will be an essential strategy for Federal IT leaders to keep in their IT playbooks to drive optimal cost savings, performance, and security.
Iron Bow and Dell Technologies are ready to help agencies walk through these considerations and ask the right questions to determine if cloud repatriation is the right next step for them.
Want to learn more? Reach out to Iron Bow Technologies to see how we and our partners like Dell Technologies can help agencies with their multi-cloud strategies and cloud repatriation. Contact Us
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