The repatriation of the cloud: A growing trend
The 94% of IT leaders have been involved in some kind of cloud repatriation project in the last three years. Rising costs, complexities, and vendor lock-in are the main culprits. This phenomenon is not just a statistic; many companies are discussing it.
David Carrero, founder of Stackscale (private infrastructure and cloud), highlighted the importance of private solutions and bare-metal, combined with on-premise solutions in data centers, but leaving aside hyper-scale public clouds that seek to make their customers captive to “uncontrol” their future costs.
Andrew Walker, Business Development Head at Gameye, commented: “Big cloud providers want to sell you their own comprehensive solution, but when you try to do everything in one package, you can’t solve all the problems equally well.” Another iGaming platform CTO added, “When you jump to the cloud, costs can quickly spiral out of control. You end up wasting a lot of resources and, if you are not aware of the necessary measures to control costs, your CFO will soon knock on your door.”
These experiences underscore that cloud-first strategies are reaching their limits.
The need for an exit strategy
If the last decade was the era of cloud-native startups and cloud transformations, we are now entering a season of infrastructure optimization and reverse migrations. To make this transition successfully, it is essential to have a cloud exit strategy.
Even if you have no immediate plans to migrate out of the cloud, having an exit strategy is a key part of contingency planning. Ideally, this strategy should be finalized before signing any contract with a cloud provider.
A cloud exit strategy will support business continuity if migrating becomes necessary, whether due to rising costs, new legal requirements, mergers or acquisitions, or if the cloud provider stops supporting an essential application or service.
Benefits and key steps to develop an exit strategy
Avoid vendor lock-in
Having an exit strategy provides greater bargaining power and helps avoid vendor lock-in, preventing dependence on a single cloud provider. This is crucial to maintaining flexibility and control over the technological infrastructure.
Key steps for an effective strategy
1. Identify stakeholders: Determine who will be responsible for what areas and form a working team with representatives from all involved areas, such as business owners, IT leadership, technology architects, procurement, legal and compliance, IT security, and finance.
2. Understand the current environment and define a successful outcome: Evaluate your current infrastructure to identify servers, monthly billing, inefficiencies, platform integrations, and coupled systems that may not be transferable to a new data center.
3. Research and quote alternative solutions: Compare infrastructure alternatives, including on-premises options, colocation, hosting bare metal, and hybrid solutions. Get customized estimates from preferred providers and balance costs with performance and support.
4. Calculate total migration costs: Include hardware costs, hosting, data migration, labor, and overlay services to keep applications running during the transition.
5. Prepare for challenges: Expect to encounter challenges, especially if your infrastructure was focused on a single provider. You may need to adopt new configurations or technologies, such as new types of databases or applications.
The time to plan is now
As David Heinemeier Hansson, Co-founder and CTO of 37Signals, indicated, “the fundamental conclusion we arrived at was that, by and large, [the cloud] is not easier, faster, or cheaper.” Cloud-first strategies are reaching their limits of effectiveness, and not having a robust cloud exit strategy is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in infrastructure management.
A cloud exit strategy will allow you to avoid vendor lock-in and execute a successful migration when necessary. A good example is the UK National Health Service (NHS) cloud exit strategy, detailing the circumstances and plans for an effective migration.
Planning your cloud exit now can ensure business continuity and maintain flexibility in an ever-changing technological environment.