Research by IDC shows that 85% of the companies surveyed repatriated cloud workloads in 2019, up 5% from the previous year’s survey. Half of those companies expect to be completely repatriated by 2021.
The Cloud Pulse survey also found that the main repatriation drivers are security (47%), cost (42%), performance (32%), compliance (28%) and the need to reduce management complexity (27%).
Still, public cloud remains an essential part of business plans because it allows access to a vast number of services and functions that businesses don’t have to develop or maintain themselves. It also allows closer cost tracking and the flexibility to change or drop what doesn’t work for the business.
According to Ryan Skipp, a cloud architect at T-Systems, the high rate of repatriation confirms that companies often have preconceived opinions about public cloud.
He says cloud adoption is only partly about the technology and is really about translating business needs into a new paradigm.
Skipp likens on-premise cloud to an egg with IT being the shell protecting everything inside, but 'Public cloud offers processes and security that most corporations can’t provide for themselves'. Once data has been migrated, he says, a company no longer has a fixed perimeter to protect. IT becomes the skeleton for business operations and it needs to have sensors in place to know when the organisation’s perimeter is compromised.
Expensive mistakes
“Public cloud isn’t just another technology for admins to learn. If organisations understand what needs to be done and what processes can get it done, the technology can perform its defined function, minimising service pauses and risks.”
It takes a lot of learning for IT to move from its comfort zone.
Ryan Skipp, T-Systems.
Skipp finds that the most successful repatriations are based on a blueprint that the whole organisation has been briefed on.
“Migration is a debt on the company’s future. If we’re not all pulling together using aligned methods and standards, integration and development becomes much more costly later.”
big ball of tangled string
To avoid ending up with a ‘big ball of tangled string’ in cases where an organisation had migrated workloads but has lost track of where they’re being deployed, Skipp has this advice:
- Cloud fails because governance is not in place to support it:
Start by updating governance and policies regarding cloud use and security to align with the migration. Business operations models should also be updated. - Classify business applications and assign responsibility:
Businesses are responsible for the data created in business operations; IT needs to manage the data. - Define interfaces for integration to access data and query existing internal systems.
- Establish compliance and control requirements for business environments. Then, find providers to match the requirements. This optimises the multi-vendor approach.
- Form agreements with public cloud vendors, based on compliance and user requirements.
- Educate the rest of the business on migration security and protection and keep it in the loop.
“It takes a lot of learning for IT to move from its comfort zone, and if you can maintain balance through the migration through thoughtful planning, the public cloud can be your oyster."
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