JETTING OFF OUT OF THE CLOUD

A new trend is appearing in 2023: leaving the cloud. After years of big corporations (that happen to run cloud infrastructure) proclaiming the cloud is the best thing since sliced bread, it turns out it’s not. Largely after years of investment and below-cost sales, companies that now feel they have a captive audience are starting to turn the screws.

According to CloudZero’s 2022 report, only 40% of the respondents estimated their “cloud costs are about where they should be or lower”, and in Anodot’s 2022 report, 50% of IT managers said that “it’s difficult to get cloud costs under control”.

One real-world example is HEY (https://world.hey.com/ dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud251760fb), which explained that it took six months to migrate legacy services from the cloud. Even with the procurement of two pallets of Dell servers powering 4,000 vCPUs, it’ll save the company $1.5 million per year. The chief technology officer said, “I still think the cloud has a place for companies early enough in their lifecycle that the spend is either immaterial or the risk that they won’t be around in 24 months is high. Just be careful that you don’t look at those lavish cloud credits as a gift! It’s a hook.”

But costs aren’t the only reason to leave the cloud. IBM’s 2022 Transformation Index shows that 54% of respondents agree that “public cloud is not secure enough”. Concerns are driven by recurring vulnerabilities in cloud providers and the impact of cloud failures on the internet. Performance can also be an issue, but for more complex reasons, as cloud providers tend to provide better hardware than private owners, but local storage access advantages and lower local network latencies have unintended consequences.