Cloud repatriation: Five reasons to repatriate data from cloud
PA Consulting’s business resilience expert, Adam Stringer, comments on the key drivers of cloud repatriation in Computer Weekly.
Commenting on security and regulation, Adam says: “It is a misconception that regulation creates significant barriers to moving workloads to the cloud. Regulators do demand rigour, just as they do for other outsourced arrangements, but there are many successful examples of highly regulated firms migrating to the cloud.” The key lies in careful planning, he adds.
On whether the workload was not suited to the cloud, or cloud migration was poorly planned or executed, Adam says: “If your data architecture is a mess and you move your data to the cloud, you just end up with a mess in the cloud.” A move to the cloud will not, in itself, fix IT design issues, he adds.
And where organisations want to use the cloud – either as a redeployment or a greenfield project – they need to apply the same or higher standards of design. “Architectural rigour is as important for cloud deployments as it is for on-prem,” says Adam. “If they don’t get that right, businesses will end up having to repatriate parts of their estate.”
Commenting on provider failure, Adam concludes: “The question to ask before moving a workload to the cloud is: does this increase the resilience of the customer or market-facing service? If you’re only moving to reduce costs, the overheads of building resilience back in at a later date could offset any benefit.”
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