Struggling to Contain Cloud Costs? Top Talent in Sophisticated Enterprises Share Your Frustration

Are you recovering from a cloud initiative that cost more than expected?  

Did your latest AWS invoice catch you off guard?  

Are egress and storage fees making your cloud costs impossible to forecast, putting pressure on your budget? 
You’re far from alone.  Well-staffed teams of top IT talent frequently suffer the same fate.  And that’s leading to the migration of workloads from public cloud to data center infrastructure that is privately controlled.

Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report found that 21% of both workloads and data have been repatriated from public cloud to private infrastructure .  And this is far from the first instance we’re seeing of pullback from the cloud.  There are copious data points indicating the difficulty talented tech teams have in controlling their costs is widespread. 

In referencing a multi-year Barclays survey of tech leaders Michael Dell highlighted the finding that 83% of enterprises planned to repatriate workloads back from the public cloud.   The growth in answering “yes” to that question had escalated from 43% to 83% in just the four years from 2020 to 2024.  Only 17% were NOT planning any repatriation, down from 57% a few years earlier. 

The Barclay’s survey shows an inflection point from late 2021 into early 2022, with a clear examination of cloud costs and performance escalating after that point.  Though this was simply a survey based on intent, it had a lot of validity, as it is based on a large sample size.  Public cloud continues to be quite costly, and for many of our customers managing those costs is the very reason they’ve partnered with us.  

Hybrid remains the dominant model for corporate IT, as it allows workloads to be housed in the most efficient and productive manner.  Repatriation rarely means pulling everything back from the cloud, more typically for a large enterprise it refers to moving workloads that are a poor fit for public cloud back to company-controlled IT infrastructure, usually for reasons of cost, security or performance.  Even after repatriating, most companies continue to use the cloud for test dev, some customer facing apps (especially with a broad geographic reach), and other functions that may be experimental or have yet to scale.    

Much of the repatriation you see involves companies that moved to the cloud without considering what success would look like at scale.  Projected savings from public cloud often don’t materialize once growth takes hold.

If your workloads are steady and predictable, there’s an excellent chance that your applications would be much more cost effective in a traditional data center environment.   Whether the servers are on your property or in a colocation environment, customers frequently report savings in the 30%-60% range compared to the public cloud.

Advertising and savvy marketing created the impression in the executive suite and boardrooms that cloud is a tech panacea.  Now that the invoices have arrived, the cloud looks less like the solution to all IT problems. If a couple of years ago people within your organization brushed aside your concerns about cloud, you’ll likely find there’s now greater recognition that the public cloud isn’t always the best solution for every workload. 

We’d love to talk with you to find out more about your IT infrastructure challenges and see if our hybrid colocation solutions can give you the security, reliability, and predictable costs you need. For more information or to schedule a tour email us at strategy@directLTx.com.