The great repatriation? IT leaders reset cloud strategies to optimize value

“The repatriations for good reasons are a higher percentage of repatriations now,” Alletto adds.

He points to his work on a recent merger, where the lead company had a goal to trim costs. That company determined it could move a workload out of the cloud and into an on-prem data center owned by the acquired company to get the desired savings without impacting performance.

“It shows that there are good reasons for repatriation,” Alletto says.

IT leaders say they are adjusting their cloud strategies to incorporate that perspective and allow for more options. They say there is a philosophical movement away from 100% cloud to hybrid as the ideal, with strategies that emphasize assessments of where workloads should be based on changing considerations.

“We keep tweaking to get the right balance, the right equilibrium,” Chege says.

Tej Patel, vice president for IT and CIO at Stevens Institute of Technology, is taking such an approach. He says: “The question should be: Where do I want to put my workload?”

Like others, Patel recognizes the benefits of public cloud, such as its scalability and elasticity to its numerous features and capabilities. But similar to others, he also acknowledges the challenges of managing and optimizing its use — specifically controlling costs and ensuring compliance with security and privacy standards.

As such, he has a hybrid strategy, seeing hybrid as the destination and not merely a way station to all-in with cloud. In fact, the university recently deployed high-performance computing (HPC) clusters on premises, after determining on-prem to be better than a public cloud deployment.

“We were very thoughtful in our approach,” he says. “We consider each scenario separately to make sure the infrastructure meets the needs of the user or the business services they’re looking for. The infrastructure exists to meet what the business wants to do. A hybrid environment can help deliver this.”