Data Repatriation from the Cloud!

Repatriation Savings!

In 2017, Dropbox list $75M in savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul. The majority of which included data repatriation of workloads from public cloud. The same report also shows that that across 50 of the top public software companies currently utilizing cloud infrastructure. An estimated $100B of market value is being lost among them due to cloud impact on margins.

Companies are moving workloads into the cloud that use to run 24/7 in their own data-centers into Public clouds. In the short term this makes sense as Public cloud offer flexibility and scale that no on premise solution can offer.

The report makes for a fascinating read.

Moving costs of Data

Most Cloud companies charge very little for data transported within their ecosystem. When using applications exposed to the internet or moving data between companies public/private cloud it becomes very expensive. We recently had a client that was moving there on-prem security logs up into Azure for Analysis and it got so expensive with data transport costs that my client had to reduce the amount of security logs they could audit. This is far from an ideal situation.

Data Security

Moving work loads to cloud infrastructure is not necessarily safer for our data.

Let me give an example. You want a database for your new software.

You can

• Use traditional methods where deployment teams, security teams, server admins, database admins and network admins work together (slowly) to deliver your database.
• Use public cloud where you don’t need any admin experience at all to deploy your database.

When dealing with private data where data breaches have huge repercussions, I know where I would want to keep my data. Behind the lock and key of people who know what they are doing.

Project managers are a fickle bunch, they want nothing more than to finish their project and move onto the next one. Developers are under such pressure to meet timelines that security becomes a nice to have and not a essential need. Executives are even more so as the want to make short term savings and profits to please the stock holders.

Cross this with Cloud services who encourage business to move workloads away from the more secure Private clouds with the suggestions of short term savings and you have one expensive mess. Once the data goes into public Cloud, repatriation of the data back to the safer private Cloud environment becomes almost impossible. Its designed like this on purpose. I was at a call recently with one of the big Database vendors who were describing to our teams how many tools they had to move our data into the Cloud. When asked how many tools they had to move it back into our data center, then they had no answer. No one seemed to ask them this before.

Conclusion

How they got there is easy to understand. The Cloud is much easier to work with and develop on. To those Companies who have not planned in advance for repatriation of their data. I imagine they will have a much larger bill in the long run as Public Cloud companies will not make repatriation. easy.

Find more of my opinion pieces in my blog.