The rising trend of cloud repatriation – relocating workloads and applications from the public cloud to on-premises – could be due to missed expectations around growing cloud costs, new research from IDC warns.

The new report found a mismatch of expectations and reality is driving more and more organisations to abandon the public cloud in favour of local data storage.

According to the group’s Cloud Pulse survey for Q4 2023, nearly half of cloud buyers spent more on cloud than they expected, with 59% expecting similar overruns in 2024. Forecasting costs can be a challenge due to the complexities of the cloud environment, on top of uncontrollable external impacts.

Further, increasing costs for energy and third-party services, as well as fiscal implications of AI, contribute to these unexpectedly high bills.

It should be clarified, however, that only 8-9% of companies plan a full workload repatriation, with most instead choosing to repatriate specific parts of their workloads.

The IDC report noted that cloud repatriation is also being driven by a mismatch of workloads. Not all workloads benefit from the cloud infrastructure, and performance and latency complaints are common, especially across applications that need real-time processing.

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Security and compliance concerns were also a noted reason, despite cloud infrastructure boasting advanced security tactics. Data breaches, as well as compliance with regulators, were a major concern cited by those moving away from the cloud.

It makes sense then that backup/disaster recovery processes and production data are some of the most commonly repatriated workload elements.

Further, the already complex cloud environment is only getting more complex, as multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments become more common place. Managing across different vendors and platforms, integrating cloud services, and ensuring security consistency can prove too much of a challenge, making cloud adoption a daunting prospect to many firms.

Another reason for cloud repatriation is simply to allow for greater operational control across IT stacks, which can help organisations more specifically tailor their infrastructure with on-premise workloads.