Share this:
If you search any number of articles discussing cloud trends, they will claim what we’ve all been repeatedly told: everything is moving to the cloud. But is that actually the case?
The reality is that not all applications are actually suitable in public cloud environments and this could be for any number of reasons. In certain scenarios, it may be more expensive. Imagine renting a car vs. owning one, the latter is always more economical in the long run, despite the convenience of renting a car. In other scenarios you may need to deploy your application in an environment with particularly sensitive data or specific regulatory requirements. Regardless of the reason, we are seeing more and more trends where IT organizations have evolved their strategy where they are now making full use of hybrid deployment models.
What is Cloud Repatriation?
The idea of cloud repatriation is when enterprise application data that was deployed in the cloud, is now moving back on-prem to either private cloud or hosted environments. But does this mean the cloud is going away and that all of the trends we’ve read about are wrong? Of course not.
What does it really mean for your organization?
What we are observing is a situation in which customers who were planning on either exclusively moving everything to the cloud or exclusively putting everything on-prem are instead looking at each workload on a case-by-case basis and deploying them in their optimal location.
In fact, in a recent article titled Cloud repatriation: What it is, what it isn’t, and why it’s not going away, the author touched on the idea that instead of there being a hard move to the cloud or a hard move back on-prem, customers pursue a hybrid model where they can make use of a public and on-prem infrastructure that best fits their performance, compliance, cost, and platform services requirements.
Considering the optimal placement of a specific workload individually (versus as a whole), gives enterprises a lot more flexibility, not only today, but long into the future as business requirements change and new technologies are introduced.
The Evolution of Hybrid Cloud Deployments
Where cloud repatriation and specifically the idea of workload flexibility referenced in the 451 Research article really come into play is when you think about the future of hybrid cloud deployments.
In today’s Hybrid Cloud model, people will either put data in the cloud, on-prem, or a mixture of both. But this is the minimalist definition of a Hybrid Cloud. In a more sophisticated hybrid cloud deployment, an application that was initially deployed in the cloud won’t necessarily move on-prem (as we all know, this isn’t such a simple task). If you think about a product or project as a collection of applications, you may find that the most effective way to successfully deliver the product is by having some of the applications running in the cloud and some on-prem. In order for this to work, not only must the placement of the application be flexible, but the application component must be able to talk to each other. The way to accomplish this is through a common API to assemble the application and then use an integrated management API in the cloud which can view, manage, and maintain both on-prem and cloud-based resources at a global scale. Only then can an organization realize and benefit from a true hybrid cloud deployment and ensure that they are making the most efficient use of their on-prem and public cloud resources.
To learn more about what benefits a single API in the cloud can bring, click here.
Share this: