Why 86% of CIOs Are Rethinking Their Cloud Strategy

DataBank recently published a white paper examining the reality of cloud repatriation, exploring why enterprises are moving workloads back from public cloud, the hidden challenges of repatriation itself, and strategies for avoiding these pitfalls altogether. To learn more, download “The Reality of Cloud Repatriation” now.

Cloud repatriation has moved from exception to expectation. According to recent research from Barclays, 86% of enterprise CIOs plan to move at least some public cloud workloads back to private cloud or on-premises infrastructure. This represents the highest percentage on record as well as a fundamental shift in how organizations think about infrastructure strategy.

This trend does not represent a rejection of cloud computing. Organizations continue investing heavily in cloud services, with Gartner forecasting that global cloud spending will reach approximately $723 billion by the end of 2025.

Yet what is does mean is that enterprises are refining their strategies based on hard-earned experience, moving from blanket “cloud-only” thinking to strategic workload placement based on actual business requirements.

Our new white paper examines cloud repatriation from three critical perspectives:

• Part 1: Examples of the reasons why enterprises are moving workloads back: cost overruns, security complexities, and support limitations driving infrastructure reconsideration.
• Part 2: Hidden repatriation challenges such as data egress fees, vendor lock-in, and required architectural changes.
• Part 3: Prevention strategies, including flexible infrastructure planning, vendor agnosticism, and strategic workload placement.

Download the full white paper to explore how organizations are rethinking their cloud strategies and building more adaptive infrastructure for the long term.

When Cloud Economics Stop Working

The shift toward cloud repatriation stems from a convergence of operational and financial challenges that emerge as organizations scale their deployments. What may begin as an attractive proposition often evolves into a more complex reality as workloads grow and business requirements change.

For example, cloud providers market their services with straightforward pricing calculators that promise transparency and predictability. However, many organizations quickly discover that actual costs far exceed initial projections. The challenge extends beyond compute and storage to include a growing number of variable charges that multiply as infrastructure scales.

Autoscaling is a prime example. While automatically adding capacity during demand spikes may initially seem like efficiency, it can generate unexpected costs when not carefully configured. Charges for load balancer requests, monitoring and observability tools, data transfer between availability zones, and countless other micro-charges accumulate quickly. What appeared as a $10,000 monthly infrastructure budget can easily balloon to $15,000 or $20,000 once these variables come into play.

The unpredictability becomes an issue for finance teams trying to forecast IT spending. Unlike fixed monthly costs for colocation or private cloud infrastructure, public cloud bills fluctuate based on usage patterns that may prove difficult to anticipate or control. For companies operating at scale, these variable costs can compound dramatically. Many organizations reach a point where the total cost of ownership for public cloud exceeds what they would pay for dedicated infrastructure, often by significant margins.

The Compliance Burden

Achieving compliance in public cloud environments requires substantially more effort, tools, and ongoing management than many organizations initially anticipate. The shared responsibility model sounds straightforward in theory, with cloud providers securing the infrastructure while customers secure their applications and data. In practice, this division creates complexity and gaps that organizations must actively address.

Meeting regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, or GDPR in public cloud often requires deploying multiple third-party security tools, implementing extensive logging and monitoring, and maintaining detailed documentation of security controls. Unlike private or hosted environments where infrastructure-level security controls are more directly accessible, public cloud customers must layer security solutions on top of the provider’s baseline offerings.

Companies may discover they inherit only limited controls from cloud providers. While providers maintain certifications and secure their underlying infrastructure, customers bear responsibility for configuration, access management, encryption, and data handling. Security teams must become experts in cloud-specific security practices while managing tools and policies across potentially multiple cloud providers.

For organizations in highly regulated industries, these challenges can become critical factors in repatriation decisions. The resource investment required to maintain compliant cloud environments can often exceed the total operational costs of managing on-premises or colocation infrastructure where security controls are more directly managed.

Support and Visibility Gaps

Public cloud providers excel at scale, but often at the expense of personalized support, especially for customers who spend less than millions annually. Organizations discover that support tiers matter significantly, and the level of assistance available to mid-market companies often falls short during critical incidents.

When infrastructure problems arise, many customers find themselves dependent on provider status pages, community forums, and support ticket systems with limited visibility into underlying issues. Public cloud support can feel impersonal and difficult to navigate during outages or performance problems. Customers may have little insight into what actually went wrong or when resolution will occur.

This visibility gap extends beyond support interactions. Public cloud abstracts infrastructure details that IT teams may need for troubleshooting, optimization, or capacity planning. While this abstraction simplifies some tasks, it can frustrate teams accustomed to deeper infrastructure control and visibility.

For mission-critical applications, these support limitations represent real business risk. When revenue-generating systems experience problems, waiting hours or days for cloud provider support to escalate and resolve issues becomes unacceptable. Organizations with demanding uptime requirements often find that the support and visibility they need justifies moving certain workloads back to environments where they have direct control and responsive support partnerships.

Prevention Over Reaction

Understanding why organizations want to leave the cloud represents only half the story. The repatriation process itself introduces substantial challenges that can prove just as costly and complex as the problems organizations are trying to solve. Data egress fees, proprietary service dependencies, and vendor lock-in often require significant application modifications.

The most effective strategy focuses on prevention rather than reaction. Organizations that partner with infrastructure providers offering multiple deployment options while maintaining vendor agnosticism from the outset can adapt as business requirements evolve without facing costly repatriation challenges or becoming trapped by a single provider’s ecosystem.

Our white paper explores these repatriation challenges in detail and provides concrete strategies for avoiding them. Download “The Reality of Cloud Repatriation“ to learn how strategic infrastructure planning and proactive decision-making prove far more effective than attempting to unwind poor cloud decisions after the fact.

In our next post, we’ll examine the hidden costs and complications organizations encounter during the repatriation process itself.