After years of marching to the cloud migration drumbeat, CIOs are increasingly becoming circumspect about the cloud-first mantra, catching on to the need to turn some workloads away from the public cloud to platforms where they will run more productively, more efficiently, and cheaper. “‘Cloud exit’ became a big theme in 2023 and there’s good odds it’ll turn into a real trend for 2024. The savings are just too big to ignore for a ton of companies,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, the Danish developer of Ruby on Rails and co-owner and CTO of 37signals, which completed a six-month total exit from the cloud last June. “Enough people are realizing that the cloud marketing spiel doesn’t necessarily match their reality.” And it’s that reality of accumulated experience in the cloud that has many CIOs rethinking their platform-centric approach to cloud in favor of a workload-specific one. The resulting infrastructure of choice — a combination of on-premises and hybrid-cloud platforms — will aim to reduce cost overruns, contain cloud chaos, and ensure adequate funding for generative AI projects. David Linthicum, former chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte, says many enterprise CIOs who got caught up in the race to the cloud are now fixing their “misadventures” by seeking out the ideal platforms for various applications — whether that is in a private cloud, on an industry cloud, within their own data centers, through a managed service provider, on the edge, or orchestrated in a multicloud architecture. “The most common motivator for repatriation I’ve been seeing is cost,” writes Linthicum, who conjectures that “most enterprise workloads aren’t exactly modern” and thus not best fits for the cloud. Srinivasan CR, EVP of cloud and cybersecurity services and chief digital officer at Tata Communications, sees many enterprises “getting more nuanced” with their cloud use and strategies in an effort to balance performance, costs, and security.
