Marc Dowd
Marc Dowd (Principal, European Client Advisory)

The cloud conversation has been and gone – no longer a hot topic at conferences and in the technology press, it is now a fact of life. Business as usual.

 

Still, we are really only starting the journey to public cloud holding the majority of our compute and storage. Our research at IDC tells us that it will take five more years before the majority of organisations spend more than 50% of their infrastructure budgets on public cloud.

 

We have learned some important lessons in the past few years – not everything that glisters is gold, and whilst living in a world of unlimited compute and storage powered by your OpEx budget can be liberating it can also bite you if you’re not careful. More than one organisation I know of has enthusiastically adopted a cloud-first strategy, only to find they can’t move a lot of legacy applications and find they are now paying for two infrastructure estates.

 

Additionally, we often don’t factor in a possible data repatriation strategy when we move to the cloud. But we are seeing lots of data moved back out of public cloud when, for example, usage profiles or security considerations change.

 

If you need to move data out of your public cloud service, are you able to do that without incurring enormous costs? Is there a migration path, or have you inadvertently built a ship in a bottle – never getting out through that very literal bottleneck? If you don’t include repatriation in your cloud strategy, that might be exactly what you end up with.

 

 

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