If we were to survey multiple companies, the main reasons could be summarised in three main blocks: scalability, security and savings.
- Scalability: the main reason is that “hyperscalars” have a large capacity of resources that can be allocated or released according to the needs of each client. Thus, companies can scale their operations without limitations, taking advantage of market opportunities and responding to their usage needs.
- Security: Another basic pillar of clouds is their high level of security for enterprise data and applications. These measures include encryption, authentication, backup, monitoring, threat detection and prevention, among others. In addition, large providers often comply with the most stringent privacy and data protection standards and regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
- Savings: Initially, migrating to the cloud brings significant cost savings for businesses, as it eliminates the need to purchase, install and maintain proprietary infrastructure. Customers only pay for the resources they consume.In short, we could say that “a priori” the cloud is still the most convenient platform for building and deploying new systems, as it has the latest and greatest of almost everything.
In short, we could say that “a priori” the cloud is still the most convenient platform for building and deploying new systems, as it has the latest and greatest of almost everything. The cloud is a good choice for modern applications that can use a cluster of severless or containerised services.
They are also a very powerful and useful tool for many businesses and use cases, provided they are used properly and consciously. A general recommendation is that enterprises adopt a hybrid approach that allows them to take advantage of the best of both worlds: the flexibility and scalability of public clouds, and the control and efficiency of in-house data centres.
Repatriation
For the past couple of years, a concept called repatriation has been gaining popularity.
That is, the process of moving data, workloads and applications that were previously moved to the cloud back to a local data centre or from a public cloud to a private cloud.
The main reasons for repatriation given by companies that choose to bring their data in-house are often:
Cost
Initially the cost of getting started with cloud providers is relatively low. However, as companies grow and increase their data and user base, the cost of cloud services can become very high as it tends to increase exponentially. The ease and speed of scaling clouds are designed to do just that, to scale quickly in cost. What, in the short term, together with a lower estimated initial usage and consumption, seems like a big cost saving, in the long term and with increased usage becomes a much higher cost than it would be in an onprem environment.
The need to modernise your applications
One lever for migrating to the cloud may be the need to modernise your applications, which is also linked to the reason for economic savings. Most companies with “legacy” or “traditional” systems have a point in time where they have to decide what to do with these applications, as in some cases the suppliers of this software stop supporting old versions or even disappear.
In other cases, renewing the hardware that supports these applications can be a very large investment and they prefer to pay in “easy instalments” periodically to a supplier.
However, when enterprises run workloads using a traditional infrastructure architecture, there is a negative impact on the cost of using a public cloud.
In other words, those who tried to use the cloud as a simple host for their workloads and did not optimise them for their new location have had much larger bills than expected.
