Reclaiming Control: Mastering the Art of Cloud Repatriation
In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, organizations are constantly reevaluating their cloud strategies to ensure they align with business goals. A growing trend is cloud repatriation, the process of migrating data, applications, or workloads from the cloud back to on-premises infrastructure or another cloud environment. In this post, we explore what cloud repatriation is, what it takes to manage it, and all the things you need to consider before initiating such a significant effort.
What is Cloud Repatriation?
Cloud repatriation is about migrating workloads from public cloud environments back to on-premises data centers or other cloud platforms. Many reasons behind this shift reflects the needs for organizations to evolve and adapt their IT infrastructure to align IT resources and business strategies. However, cloud repatriation is distinct from cloud migration and cloud optimization. They are all interconnected yet they represent different strategies within IT infrastructure management.
If desired, learn more about the meaning of cloud repatriation and the main reasons behind it.
Managing the Complexity of Cloud Repatriation
The technical complexities involved in repatriating applications and workloads can be daunting. It requires careful planning and execution to ensure compatibility and functionality in the new environment.
Many stakeholders must be involved (from IT, security, product management, business, risk management, finance, legal), some expertise brought in and/or developed in-house, resources allocated and realistic timelines established through some solid program management, new processes designed, and new solutions purchased to manage the migration and more.
That is a significant endeavor that should not be underestimated. But organizations can build that muscle over time and end up with streamlined operations to manage this type of activity.
Important Considerations for Cloud Repatriation
As already mentioned, cloud repatriation is a massive effort with many embedded pitfalls that you need to avoid. It must be well thought through. Here is a list of the most common ones.
Planning & Inventory
You need a clear plan about what you’ll need to move off one or multiple clouds, and where these workloads will leave: on-premises, in a private cloud, another public cloud? And you need to identify what workloads will be most critical and/or would require the least disruption. And last, if you have to take a phased approach, determine what would be part of each wave and why (always better to determine the why, so that it is easier to adjust when needed).
Interdependencies
Once you have a clear inventory of what you need to move, make sure, you don’t have some applications that will still be dependent on cloud services. If so, see if you need to revise the move of these workloads or if you need to develop a plan to manage them post repatriation.
Regulatory compliance
Your organization may have to abide by some regulations that determine the storage/hosting of some data. As you consider your repatriation, check that you will not end up violating any law or regulation, and in case of any risk, adjust your plan accordingly.
Cost implications
Yes, while cost might be the trigger of your cloud repatriation decision, you also need to consider it when planning for that repatriation. Check what your provider charges for data egress fees. These fees are related to moving or transferring your data from your cloud provider when leaving its cloud. These may vary by vendor, use case and any other considerations.
Also verify that your contract with your cloud provider doesn’t have penalties, or fees related to the termination of services, or significant reduction of existing services you signed up for.
Contractual obligations
Besides cost-related contractual requirements as previously mentioned, you may also have some notice periods to respect, whether it is to communicate your contractual changes, or about when and how you can execute your repatriation.
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans
Even though this is a planned disruption, your repatriation must be shared with your business continuity team and managed so that the amount of potential downtime gets minimized. And, you also need to plan for any unwelcome disruption happening during your planned move.
Solution, resources and process
You’ll need to have a clear understanding of how things will happen during your repatriation. The people and roles that will have to be involved. The process and workflows that will have to be established and executed. And of course, the solution or tools you are going to use to carry out the move. You’ll want as much orchestration and automation possible to help manage the complexity at hand, along with the right security and protection of your data during and after the repatriation.
Testing
If possible, you may want to test a small-scale repatriation for a non-critical type of workloads, so that you can validate that your assumptions are correct, train the involved staff, and identify and address any issue before the big move. As mentioned above, the solution you select may help you to easily and efficiently run multiple tests with minimal disruption in your production environment.
Protection of workloads post cloud repatriation
This last point seems obvious, but these repatriated workloads will have to be protected. Your data security and data protection plans will have to cover them to take care of data management and data access, but also to ensure you’ll be able to recover from accurate and recent data in case of a cyberattack or any major disruption.
Cloud Repatriation: An Essential Aspect of IT Infrastructure Optimization
Cloud repatriation is becoming an essential strategy for many organizations looking to optimize their IT infrastructure. Driven by factors such as security, cost management, performance, compliance, and the desire to avoid vendor lock-in, repatriating workloads offers numerous benefits. Zerto stands out as a powerful tool in this process, providing seamless migration and recovery solutions that empower businesses to reclaim control over their IT environments.
For more information on how Zerto can facilitate your cloud repatriation journey, read our Workload Mobility with Zerto datasheet, or simply get in touch with us to discuss your needs further and assess how Zerto can hep you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is repatriation in cloud computing?
Repatriation in cloud computing is the process of migrating data, applications, or workloads from public cloud environments back to on-premises infrastructure or other cloud platforms. This shift is often driven by factors like cost, security, and compliance requirements.
Check out this definition of cloud repatriation.
Cloud repatriation vs cloud migration: what’s the difference?
Cloud repatriation refers to the migration of workloads from public cloud environments back to on-premises data centers or other cloud platforms. As such, cloud repatriation is a form of cloud migration. Usually, “cloud migration” is understood as a move “to” the cloud, but as shown here, it can also be a move away “from” the cloud.
Zerto is ideally suited for migration initiatives—to, from, and between clouds— as it provides seamless and protected migration capabilities, bringing peace of mind to all involved in that process.
Are businesses moving away from the cloud?
While many businesses continue to leverage cloud services, some are moving away from the cloud due to concerns about cost, security, performance, and regulatory compliance. However, that move is most likely going to be measured as not all workloads and data are expected to be moved out of the cloud.
Cloud repatriation allows these organizations to regain control over their IT environments and align their infrastructure with evolving business needs. Very often this leads organizations to move from a public cloud only model to a hybrid and multi-cloud approach, involving on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and multiple cloud providers, public or not.
Anthony Dutra 
