Some firms hit eject on Cloud-first

A decade ago, moving an enterprise's workload to Cloud was touted as the Next Big Thing in the tech world — a move that could lower operating costs, enable scale, and expedite innovation.

- AVIK DAS

But that's now changing, at least partially.

Firms are ditching their Cloud-first approach for a more nuanced hybrid strategy — a mix of on-prem (short for on-premise) infrastructure and Cloud presence — to counter escalating costs, rising cybersecurity concerns, and compliance risks across many countries.

This shift — known as Cloud repatriation — involves moving applications, data, and workloads from a public Cloud environment back to on-prem infrastructure, private Clouds, or other alternative hosting environments, and it's gaining traction.

A Barclays CIO survey last year showed that 83 per cent of enterprise chief information officers planned to repatriate at least some workloads in 2024, rising from 43 per cent in 2020.

This is because the sheer volume of workloads in Cloud is leading to higher expenses, alongside larger storage requirements and massive computing programs in artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, and data processing, which require hundreds of graphics processing units and terabytes of data.