Why some companies are backing away from the public cloud

Many business leaders are taking a clear-eyed view of the cloud's benefits and drawbacks. Technical debt may be at the root of many repatriation decisions.

The cloud has dominated enterprise technology provision for a decade or more. Public cloud services, with huge capacity, commitments to security, and assurances that the latest and greatest technologies are running underneath, offer a compelling value proposition. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), capacity is critical. However, a new survey suggests evidence of a movement away from public provision.

Close to seven in 10 companies (69%) have moved at least some apps off the cloud and back to on-premise systems or private clouds, the survey of 1,420 IT executives from Rackspace finds. Reasons given for this retrenchment back to on-premise environments include data security and compliance concerns, cited by 50%, better integration with existing on-premise systems, mentioned by ...