The cloud demigration
After almost a decade of cloud hype, with only 20% to 30% of enterprise workloads on the public cloud, the bills are increasingly higher than expected.
Lack of planning results in underoptimized cloud solutions. Even so, the journey to the cloud for an increasing number of organizations has taken an unexpected turn.
There’s also grey skies in cloud earnings.
While many organizations fully migrated to the cloud over the past decade, many others had one foot in the cloud and one on the ground. By now, companies have seen all the cloud has to offer, from on-demand bare metal to Kubernetes, and have a more educated opinion on its benefits and shortcomings.
The cloud promised substantial cost-saving advantages and reduced complexity. While this is true for large enterprise-level environments, it’s not always the case. Cloud computing is probably not the best deal for SMEs unless the company is scaling fast.
The cloud is also ideal in a simple, low-traffic environment or when you’re just starting up. It still works great if you have seasonal traffic, which sometimes makes your load unpredictable.
Any organization that falls between the hyper complexity of an enterprise environment and a simple low-traffic one might be unable to justify paying extra to get all the cloud advantages.
Sure, managing bare metal is not cool. But the cloud is not a breeze either. When you draw the bottom line, your ops team won’t be substantially smaller in a cloud environment than in a bare metal one. There are just different sets of problems that have to be managed.
From an ITAM point of view, the complexity didn’t shrink either. It just morphed into a different beast we need to tame. You still need to manage licenses in the cloud, and now you also need to monitor costs in near-realtime.
Lastly, there’s an important aspect that often gets overlooked. From an ethos point of view, if everyone moved to the cloud, which is controlled by a handful of corporations, the whole idea of the internet would dissolve. The internet was supposed to be decentralized. For everyone. Unstoppable. What happened to that ideal?
If an AWS region goes down because of a strike, natural disaster, or even war, how many services go down?
