Solving the Challenge of Public Cloud Workload Repatriation with a Private Cloud Solution

While the steady march toward cloud computing continues in most enterprises, some have not yet experienced their desired cloud outcomes. Instead of saving money, their costs have risen. In other enterprises, the challenges associated with addressing security and compliance mandates have grown. It’s not surprising organizations that are facing these issues are looking for a remedy.

One of the reasons that a cloud journey doesn’t yield the intended outcomes in some organizations is related to the early days of cloud adoption. Back then, many companies adopted the cloud without fully understanding how to extract value from it.

For example, many organizations adopted the popular method of lifting and shifting workloads from their on-premises data centers to the cloud. What they didn’t realize is that this migration method was never likely to yield the anticipated benefits. Workloads migrated in this way were simply not capable of leveraging cloud features in ways that made the organization more agile, flexible, scalable and cost-effective.

When an organization discovers that it needs to refactor a workload to attain cloud benefits, it can find that the cost of executing the process outweighs the cost of simply moving out of public cloud.

Overcoming public cloud challenges

Cost is not the only issue organizations are facing in public clouds. Another is data residency certification. While the geo-zoning available in public clouds allow most businesses to be reasonably confident about certifying data residency, for multinationals or businesses purchasing public cloud services through resellers, the veracity of the certification can be compromised.

Another example is security. Public clouds are not inherently insecure. However, under the shared responsibility model, the organization itself is ultimately responsible for security. Some industries, such as healthcare, may require extremely tight security, which is easier to address outside of public cloud.

When it comes to workload performance, some companies may find that upgrading an application introduces tighter latency requirements that require workloads to be run closer to business operations versus in a public cloud.

The bottom line is that circumstances can change in today’s organizations and industries. What seemed like a good cloud decision yesterday may not be today. The best approach to the cloud is to adopt the practice of continual workload optimization. This means running workloads on the platforms that will most easily deliver the intended outcomes. And this can mean shifting from public cloud to private cloud.

Achieving a soft landing in private cloud

If an organization has decided that reversing a workload out of public cloud is the right strategy, the next concern is where it should land. While an organization might prefer its own on-premises data center, typically, it has been closed or scaled down or is out-of-date.

The reasons why many companies shifted to public cloud in the first place were to eliminate their own data centers, move IT costs from capex to opex with consumption-based pricing, or acquire the infrastructure agility, flexibility and scalability needed to support faster innovation. However, the biggest reason was to eliminate the ongoing cost of operating, maintaining, securing, powering, cooling and resourcing data centers. In short, they wanted out of the data center business.

There is another option for companies that want to migrate workloads out of public cloud — a hosted managed private cloud solution. This option not only eliminates the issues created by running a workload in public cloud, but also eliminates the need to reconstruct an on-premises data center.

Also, organizations can gain the best aspects of public cloud in a hosted managed private cloud — including consumption-based pricing, rapid provisioning and self-service. But they’re on a dedicated private platform, which enhances compliance and security, as well.

Gain the best of both cloud worlds

Rackspace Technology® recognized this need and developed a broad portfolio of private cloud solutions that include managed colocation, bare metal, OpenStack® and VMware®-based multicloud options. They are all available across our global portfolio of data centers, which are interconnected with low-cost on-ramps to the three major hyperscale public clouds through our private fiber network, RackConnect® Global.

Underpinning this range of options is a portfolio of professional advisory and managed services. For example, Rackspace Elastic Engineering provides on-demand access to a dedicated, flexible team of engineers with skills ranging from architecture design and migration planning to DevOps, security and automation. 

Reverse workload migrations are expected to become more common as more organizations seek new options in our modern cloud-optimized world. This is especially true as private cloud becomes more attractive due to its application latency, data sovereignty and proprietary high-performance computing, and as applications become more portable via containers and Kubernetes®.

When faced with the decision to repatriate workloads, few businesses want to re-establish on-premises data centers or re-deploy staff to maintain the infrastructure. As a result, managed private cloud solutions are becoming the solution of choice in the cloud modernization journeys of today’s leading organizations.