This article written by Nigel Stevens, CEO
The growth of Cloud infrastructure seems to be relentless as the big players add capacity all over the world. And why not? The rise of cloud computing and storage has meant that businesses no longer need to either build their own data centres or make long term commitments to colocation providers and invest in expensive hardware.
Pay as you go OpEx models deliver a great deal of flexibility to companies. But I wonder if we have shifted too far in our desire to so closely align resource to demand. Is it now time to consider bringing workloads back from the cloud into colocation? In my opinion this ‘cloud repatriation’ is long overdue.
After all a hotel is very comfortable, it’s easy to accommodate guests and very cost effective for a short stay. But I wouldn’t want to live in one.
In a 2021 survey, 451 Research highlighted that 14% of the Enterprises they surveyed would be migrating some of their public cloud capacity back to on-premises or colocation. Frankly that’s a lot more than I thought but it does makes sense.
In my opinion there are two main drivers: cost and security fears. Cost brings us neatly back to my hotel analogy, it’s typically less expensive to live in a house than stay in a hotel all the time and the only way to truly control your security risk is to manage it yourself.
In my view, once we take the cloud-is-brilliant-for-everything hype out of it, the sensible answer for most Enterprises has to be a hybrid model. Where predictable workloads are put into one of the many high-quality colocation facilities, critical or legacy applications are kept on-premises and fluctuating requirements are placed in the Cloud.
So, is cloud repatriation a genuine trend? I’m not sure. I have not noticed a particular uptake in Enterprise colocation. But I’m keen to hear from others who may know more than I do.
At Conscient we work with both Cloud and Colocation providers and I’m glad to report that both sectors are doing well, if it continues, I may be able to afford a long stay in a good hotel.
