Not exactly, but public cloud isn’t right for every workload
Result that the cloud is expensive, and the more workloads you move to the cloud, the more it costs. Go figure.
When we were in the “grow at all costs” phase between 2021 and 2022, it was easy to ignore or downplay the costs associated with operating in the cloud. But when companies started looking at every entry in the technology budget, it became pretty clear that the cloud bills were big and getting bigger, and maybe we should look at ways to lessen that budget impact.
The brute force way would be to say, “Let’s go back to the facility!” But there are important questions about this approach. Why did you move to the cloud in the first place? Maybe you were thinking there would be cost savings. But even if he was wrong on that point, the agility of the public cloud has always been its main value proposition.
Think for a second about the bad old days of facilities, when you had to plan for capacity. If his company grew faster than he expected, he was pretty much stuck, putting his business in a very vulnerable position. The corporate acquisition process has always been plagued with time-consuming red tape. You have to plan to buy servers, then you need to rack and stack them. Even if you want to do that, do you still have the staff with that skill set? Chances are, you’ve been hiring for a cloud DevOps world.
While it is possible to move certain workloads with less pain than others, keep in mind that earlier this month Ofcom, a UK communications watchdog, issued a report criticizing major players in cloud infrastructure for making it too difficult to move workloads between clouds, and presumably back up and running. -prem, if that was the wish. If it’s really that expensive and difficult, what’s the point of companies doing it?
I decided to explore whether companies really want to go back on premises. I asked a group of industry experts about it, and while I got a decidedly mixed set of responses, it seems that the idea of cloud repatriation is being greatly exaggerated.
The cloud infrastructure market is huge and growing
Let’s start with the fact that the cloud infrastructure market is huge, even as it slows amid economic uncertainties affecting all industries. The market reached more than $200 billion in 2022. The fourth quarter was up 21% to $61 billion, according to Synergy Research. While it was down from the previous year, when the market grew 36%, it was still a substantial market by any measure.
“From a numerical perspective, we continue to see strong growth in the cloud market: global spending on cloud infrastructure services in 2022 is up 26% from 2021, despite troubles in China and a very strong US dollar. , while investment in local companies infrastructure remains weak,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and director of research at Synergy Research, told TechCrunch+. “Servers shipped to enterprises grew 3% in 2022. Looking ahead, we continue to forecast strong growth in the cloud market and weak growth in on-premises infrastructure.”
