Trivia question for today: How many companies are moving off the cloud back to on-premises deployment? I don't have an answer, but an article in InfoWorld (I'm an InfoWorld alumni, myself) talked about a recent study by Citrix.
"The survey questioned 350 IT leaders on their current approaches to cloud computing. The survey also showed that 93% of respondents had been involved with a cloud repatriation project in the past three years. That is a lot of repatriation. Why?"
The answer is cost. While some applications clearly benefit from being hosted in the cloud, apparently a lot of companies are discovering they jumped on the cloud bandwagon without considering if the cloud actually benefits their applications. One such company discovered it can save millions of clams by hosting enterprise applications on premise. Of course, by "on premise", they mean clusters in at least two different geographical locations for purposes of security.
According to The Register a company called 37Signals expects to save $7 million by repatriating their cloud-based software back to being on-premise. They spent $600,000 on servers amortized over 5 years, and with the required support (air conditioning, backup power, etc.) they claim the total cost will be $840,000 per year. They were spending cloud compute costs of $2.3 million per year, so it's a significant savings. In fact, they expect their hardware will be running smoothly for seven years at least, saving even more.
Have you researched whether or not the cloud is the appropriate place for your enterprise applications? Do tell.
