Most IT leaders have assets moved to the cloud to achieve some combination of better, faster, or cheaper compute and storage services. They also expect to benefit from the expertise of cloud providers—expertise that isn’t easy for companies to develop and maintain in house, unless your company happens to be a technology provider.
“While computing power and hardware costs are lower on the cloud, your approach may not allow you to enjoy these savings,” explains Neal Sample, consultant and former CIO of Northwestern Mutual. “For example, if you move the front end of an application to the cloud, but leave the back end in your data center, then all of a sudden you’re paying for two sets of infrastructure.”
Another common reason companies are disappointed is they put information assets on the cloud in a “lift and shift” operation so applications never benefit from the advantages of cloud, such as elasticity. “A good elastic app doesn’t happen magically,” says Sample. “It needs to be written native for AWS or for another platform.”
The dilemma is you never really benefit from going to the cloud until you start using native functions. And even then, you can get trapped—not just to the cloud, but to a single cloud vendor. “There are a lot of differences between an AWS, for example, and an Azure,” Sample adds. “Using the native functions of one versus the other can lock you in. However, you won’t benefit from what the cloud has to offer until you re-architect your application for the cloud—and that means using native functions.”
A third reason companies are disappointed is because of a lack of control over their information systems. This is particularly pronounced in heavily regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, where companies can be held liable for non-compliance—nobody wants to trust a third party to keep them from legal troubles. Similarly, large data aggregators feel the need for control because they don’t want to leave their core business in the hands of a cloud provider.
Overall, disappointment comes from poor planning most of the time. Gartner has been offering advice in this area—most recently in The Cloud Strategy Cookbook, 2023—which can be summed up as: develop a cloud strategy, ideally before moving to the cloud; regularly update the strategy, keeping a record in a living document; and align your cloud strategy with desired business outcomes. Many companies that ignored this advice failed to reap the benefits of the cloud. As a result, some have decided to repatriate information assets, and too many of them do so with equally poor planning.
